scholarly journals Non-state Actors, Terrorism and the New Global Reality

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aituaje Irene Pogoson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Security ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Multiplier Effect ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Global Events ◽  
State Actors

The reality that terrorists are increasingly enjoying a force-multiplier effect in both national and international realms is the preoccupation of this paper. The traditional thinking about international relations premised on the state as the primary actor in international politics is being greatly challenged as opposition to the supremacy of the state in international system by violent non state actors have become more rampant. Global events demonstrate how the influence of non-state actors and individuals is growing in world politics, assisted by an environment in which the flow of both information and disinformation enables the adoption of narratives that are not particularly based on sound facts and objective knowledge. The implication is that those involved in national and international security in the 21st century will need to formulate and re-strategize more effective, less military propelled ways and means that address the individual’s capacity to distinguish between rational and irrational in order to positively influence the forces that trigger the rise of such extremism in the first place. Until that is achieved, the threats from violent non state actors will continue to challenge some states as the terrorist groups align with others to create a convoluted and perplexing set of geopolitical and organizational networks that will prove difficult to unravel

Escape from the State of Nature: Authority and Hierarchy in World Politics

2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Lake
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Gross Domestic Product ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Principal Finding

Despite increasing attention, scholars lack the analytic tools necessary to understand international hierarchy and its consequences for politics and policy. This is especially true for the informal hierarchies now found in world affairs. Rooted in a formal-legal tradition, international relations scholars almost universally assume that the international system is a realm of anarchy. Although the fact of anarchy remains a truism for the system as a whole, it is a fallacy of division to infer that all relationships within that system are anarchic. Building on an alternative view of relational authority and recent research on the practice of sovereignty, a new conception of international hierarchy is developed that varies along two continua defined by security and economic relations. This construct is operationalized and validated, and then tested in a large-nstudy of the effects of international hierarchy on the defense effort of countries. The principal finding is that states in hierarchical relationships spend significantly less on defense relative to gross domestic product than states not in such relationships. In short, hierarchy matters and subordination pays; states appear to trade some portion of their sovereignty for protection from external security threats.

The position of the State in the international system from the perspective of major schools of thought in international relations

2019 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Salah Hassan Mohammed ◽  
Mahaa Ahmed Al-Mawla
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International System ◽  
International Order ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Status ◽  
Future Vision

The Study is based on the state as one of the main pillars in international politics. In additions, it tackles its position in the international order from the major schools perspectives in international relations, Especially, these schools differ in the status and priorities of the state according to its priorities, also, each scholar has a different point of view. The research is dedicated to providing a future vision of the state's position in the international order in which based on the vision of the major schools in international relations.

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.

Cyber Power in International Relations

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
Tim Stevens ◽  
Camino Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strategic Objectives ◽  
Or Practice ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Strategic Outcomes

This chapter provides a conceptual and analytical framework for the understanding of ‘cyber power’ in the theory and practice of international relations. Cyber power is the product of relationships between actors, rather than a material quantity that can be possessed and converted into strategic outcomes. This chapter identifies four forms of cyber power that arise from different configurations of state and non-state actors: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. Analysis of national cyber strategies shows how states develop, leverage, and exploit their relationships with the actors and structures of the international system to generate cyber power in pursuit of their strategic objectives. Cyber power should therefore be understood as a multiplicity of forms of power in and through cyberspace, not as a singular concept or practice. Moreover, cyber power should be framed within broader conceptualizations of power, rather than treated as somehow distinct and discrete.

War and international theory: a commentary on the state of the art

1984 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuen Foong Khong
Keyword(s):  
International Politics ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
International Theory

The systematic critique of scientific approaches to international politics began with Stanley Hoffmann's provocative 1960 essay, climaxed with Hedley Bull's popular piece in World Politics six years later and breathed its last gasp with Oran Young's attack on Russett's International Regions and The International System in 1969, Since then, the traditionalists have chosen to ignore the behavioralists.

International Relations and Comparative Politics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vidya Nadkarni ◽  
J. Michael Williams
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Policy Choices ◽  
Economic Interaction ◽  
Interstate System ◽  
The One ◽  
Cross Fertilization ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

Both the political science fields of International Relations (IR) and Comparative Politics (CP) developed around a scholarly concern with the nature of the state. IR focused on the nature, sources, and dynamics of inter-state interaction, while CP delved into the structure, functioning, and development of the state itself. The natural synergies between these two lines of scholarly inquiry found expression in the works of classical and neo-classical realists, liberals, and Marxists, all of whom, to varying degrees and in varied ways, recognized that the line dividing domestic and international politics was not hermetically sealed. As processes of economic globalization, on the one hand, and the globalization of the state system, on the other, have expanded the realm of political and economic interaction, the need for greater cross-fertilization between IR and CP has become even more evident. The global expansion of the interstate system has incorporated non-European societies into world politics and increased the salience of cultural and religious variables. These dynamics suggest that a study of cultures, religions, and histories, which shape the world views of states and peoples, is therefore necessary before assessments can be made about how individual states may respond to varied global pressures in their domestic and foreign policy choices.

Communism, fascism and counter-revolution in world politics

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-686
Author(s):  
Michael Mann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effects Of War

This is a rich, impressive and timely book. At a time when American and neoliberal triumphalism deny the significance of any revolution later than 1776, and when almost no-one in the social sciences is still studying either revolution or class, Fred Halliday has demonstrated that we have been living in a revolutionary age, dominated by the conjoined effects of war and class revolution. In case you find his sub-title mysterious, Karl Marx noted that the Europe of his time was dominated by five Great Powers, but Revolution, ‘the sixth Great Power’, would soon overcome them all. Halliday would suggest that Marx was only half-right. Revolution did not overcome all five Powers, but it did transform them all—and their successors. Hannah Arendt and Martin Wight also emphasized that couplings of war and revolution have dominated much of modernity. But Halliday adds that these are not to be seen as ‘disruptions’ of International Relations, they are International Relations, since they have set the overall parameters of the modern international system. They did so, he says, in three distinct revolutionary phases from the sixteenth century to the present-day: sixteenth-seventeenth century religious wars/revolutions, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlanticist wars/revolutions, and twentieth century wars/revolutions which became increasingly dominated by communism.

Theorising the international system: perspectives from Historical Sociology

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN HOBDEN
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
State Formation ◽  
International System ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
International Context ◽  
Recent Interest ◽  
State Context ◽  
Inter State

Recent interest in the work of Historical Sociologists has concentrated on their renewed interest in the state. There is considerable regard for the historical account of state formation and development produced by writers such as Mann, Skocpol and Tilly. Surprisingly there has been less attention paid to another feature of their writings—the locating of states in an inter-state context. This article examines the international context envisioned by four historical sociologists. It argues that, although these writers have been successful at historicising state formations, this powerful account has not been matched with a historical account of international relations. If this project is to move forward, a complementary historical account of international contexts, or global structures, is required.

There is no such thing as society: beyond individualism and statism in international security studies

1993 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Shaw
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Security ◽  
The State ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
International Studies ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Actor Model ◽  
Conceptual Issue

This article offers a sociological perspective on a major conceptual issue in international relations, the question of ‘security’, and it raises major issues to do with the role of sociological concepts in international studies. For some years now, the work of sociological writers such as Skocpol, Giddens and Mann1 has attracted some interest in international studies. International theorists such as Linklater and Halliday have seen their work as offering a theoretical advance both on realism and on Marxist alternatives. At the same time, these developments have involved the paradox that, as one critic puts it, ‘current sociological theories of the state are increasingly approaching a more traditional view of the state—the state as actor model—precisely at a time when the theory of international relations is getting away from this idea and taking a more sociological form.

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