scholarly journals Global Political Landscape In The Time Of The Covid-19 Pandemic: Realist, Liberal, And Constructivist Perspectives

Author(s):  
Indra Kusumawardhana

The vast majority of international relations scholars interpret world politics in the era of Covid-19 pandemic in accordance with realism by emphasizing on conflicts and the tendency of states to pursue their national interests. However, contemporary global politics shows complexity that cannot be understood from single perspective. This article seeks to interpret world politics in the era of Covid-19 pandemic using eclecticism approach by incorporating realism, liberalism, and constructivism. This article argues that the lanscape of global politics in the era of Covid-19 pandemic is characterized by three different features; conflicts and the pursuit of national interests, international cooperations based on the mutual benefit, and solidarity to help others dealing with the impact of Covid-19 pandemic. This finding implies that understanding international relations requires interperspective collaboration instead of debates and maintaing theoretical exclusivism.

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
M. A. Muqtedar Khan

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 ...


Author(s):  
Regan Burles

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.


Author(s):  
Anna M. Agathangelou ◽  
Heather M. Turcotte

Feminist international relations (IR) theories have long provided interventions and insights into the embedded asymmetrical gender relations of global politics, particularly in areas such as security, state-nationalism, rights–citizenship, and global political economies. Yet despite the histories of struggle to increase attention to gender analysis, and women in particular, within world politics, IR knowledge and practice continues to segregate gendered and feminist analyses as if they are outside its own formation. IR as a field, discipline, and site of contestation of power has been one of the last fields to open up to gender and feminist analyses. One reason for this is the link between social science and international institutions like the United Nations, and its dominant role in the formation of foreign policy. Raising the inferior status of feminism within IR, that is, making possible the mainstreaming of gender and feminism, will require multiple centers of power and multiple marginalities. However, these institutional struggles for recognition through exclusion may themselves perpetuate similar exploitative relationships of drawing boundaries around legitimate academic and other institutional orders. In engaging, listening and writing these struggles, it is important to recognize that feminisms, feminist IR, and IR are intimately linked through disciplinary struggles and larger geopolitical struggles of world affairs and thus necessitate knowledge terrains attentive to intersectional and oppositional gendered struggles (i.e., race, sexuality, nation, class, religion, and gender itself).


Author(s):  
Karine Khojayan

The article analyses possible scenarios of global world order followed by the outbreak of COVID-19. It assesses to what extend the pandemic will impact the process of transformation of the system of international relations and discusses possible scenario of the global politics for post-COVID period. The article suggests that the expected outcome of the pandemic will be bi-polar world order, which will much differ from the system of the International Relations of Cold War period. The impact of COVID-19 on ongoing processes will be tangible. In the meanwhile, bearing in mind emerging neorealistic tendencies, enhancing role of states as pivotal actors of international system and current level of global inter-dependence, the international relations cannot return to the epoch where political realism had dominant position in global affairs. The article concludes that the pandemic will not drastically change the international order, but it will decently accelerate international processes, started years ago.


Author(s):  
Elif Kalaycioglu

The end of the Cold War, the emergence of nonWestern states as influential actors in global politics, and waves of Western nativism in the United States and Europe have placed questions of cultural diversity centrally in global politics. Although the mainstream paradigms of international relations (IR), namely, realism and liberalism, have remained focused on material power and mutual gains via institutions as the cruxes of global politics, starting with the mid-1990s, an increasing number of IR scholars have attended to the question of cultural diversity and world politics. This scholarship has approached culture, alternatively, as a set of shared meanings stable over time, meanings that are institutionally stabilized, or a field of multiple and competing representations. Accordingly, some (the English school, conventional constructivism) posit culture as internally coherent and externally diverse, associating shared culture with accord and cultural diversity with discord. Others (critical constructivism, postcolonial IR) focus on the power-laden processes through which cultural diversity comes to be associated with Otherness and discord. Most of the relevant scholarship, however, defies paradigmatic categorization. These works are better grouped as interventions into IR theory and as scholarship that focuses on the impact of cultural diversity on the conduct of world politics. The first set of interventions have identified the state of cultural diversity in IR theorizing as an absence, a deep suspicion and an active suppression, or an outdated conceptualization. The IR theoretical path forward has, accordingly, been identified as the inclusion of culture, as dispensing with key theoretical heuristics of the field, or as a new focus on how cultural diversity has been globally governed. The analyses of cultural diversity and the conduct of world politics, taken together, show the intricate connections between existing institutions and norms, and assertions of cultural diversity. While diversity challenges universalizing forms of governance, the demands for the equal recognition of diversity are shaped by existing institutions. Despite key theoretical and analytical insights, the scholarship on cultural diversity can pay further attention to (a) the relation between theoretical notions of cultural diversity and cultural diversity as employed in global politics and (b) the relation between cultural diversity and other global political domains, such as geopolitics. On this, the literature can benefit from engagement with the IR scholarship on civilizations. At the same time, the latter scholarship is highly relevant to the question at hand because civilizations are key conduits of the global politics of cultural diversity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 711-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Destradi ◽  
Johannes Plagemann

AbstractAs populists have formed governments all over the world, it becomes imperative to study the consequences of the rise of populism for International Relations. Yet, systematic academic analyses of the international impact of populist government formation are still missing, and political commentators tend to draw conclusions from few cases of right-wing populism in the Global North. But populism – conceptualised as a ‘thin’ ideology based on anti-elitism and anti-pluralism – takes different shapes across world regions as populists combine it with different ‘thick’ ideologies. To reflect such diversity and gain more systematic insights into the global implications of populism, we focus on cases of populist government formation in the Global South. We find that populists in power are not, per se, more belligerent or less willing to engage globally than their non-populist predecessors. Factors like status seeking or a country's embeddedness in international institutions mitigate the impact of populism. Its most immediate effect concerns procedural aspects: foreign policymaking becomes more centralised and personalised – yet, not entirely unpredictable, given the importance of ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populist parties and leaders. Rather than changing course entirely, populists in power reinforce existing trends, especially a tendency towards diversifying international partnerships.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 691-712
Author(s):  
Thomas Moore

AbstractThis article considers how we can develop a reflexive reading of the theological contours of global politics through Carl Schmitt's account of sovereignty. In doing this it seeks to generate a critical architecture to understand the pluralistic registers of sovereignty within world politics. This article examines the theological dimensions of sovereignty, calling for a closer reading of the theopolitical discourses of legality and legitimacy at work within the largely secular discipline of International Relations. Tracing the pluralistic dimensions of sovereignty – juristic, popular, and theopolitical – allows us to see how sovereignty is operationalised through a range of distinct political registers. When the study of sovereignty is confused with questions of preference for modes of governing (whether secular, religious, democratic, and/or juristic) the complex historical sociology of sovereignty is overlooked. Contemporary scholarship in International Relations can benefit from closer engagement with the multiple, overlapping registers of sovereignty in global politics. We may disagree with Schmitt's reading of sovereignty as ‘theopolitics’ but there is real methodological value in engaging secular scholarship in thinking about religion as a constitutive domain for global order – alongside a rich range of critical approaches.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (06) ◽  
pp. 165-176
Author(s):  
Djamel Ben MERAR ◽  
Nassera MELLAH

This article examines Rising Powers: Patterns of Power Redistribution in Global Politics, by creating a reliable framework for understanding the increasing complexities of the actors in the international arena. This is by studying the concept of power, which is one of the basic concepts in political science, whereby force imposes its logic on the curves of international relations and has multiple forms due to its complex nature. In what can be considered dual roles and reciprocal interactions, and to understand the dimensions, manifestations and nature of the actors in the power equation, especially the emergence of tensions and conflicts between the interests of the United States of America and the emerging powers in the world in light of the new strategic directions after the Cold War and each party's attempt to dominate areas of influence and wealth Proceeding from a pragmatic geopolitical policy.


Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society was published in 1977. Though considered as one of the classics in International Relations, it does not address many world political issues that concern us deeply today—volatile great power relations after the end of the Cold War, the rise of terrorism, financial crises, climate change, the impact of the Internet, deep-rooted racial inequalities, violence against women. Moreover, through the evolution of International Relations as an academic pursuit, various limitations of the type of approach followed by Bull are coming to light. Against this background, eighteen contributors to this collection, with diverse intellectual orientations and academic specializations, have revisited Bull’s book forty years on to assess its limitations and resilience. A number of contributors point to certain fundamental problems stemming from Bull’s a historical conceptual theorizing. However, several others find arguments and insights developed or hidden in his text which are still relevant, in some cases, highly so, to understanding contemporary world politics while others explore ways of augmenting Bull’s intellectual repertoire. An intricate tapestry of ideas emerges from the criss-crossing contributions to the volume and, through this, it becomes clear that there is more to The Anarchical Society than the ‘international society’ perspective with which it is conventionally associated. The contemporary relevance of Bull’s work is clearest when we recognize the flexibility of his conceptual framework and, in particular, the often overlooked potential of his concept of the ‘world political system’ of which, Bull acknowledges, modern international society is only a part.


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