bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Women and Development
Authors: Moghadam Valentine M.
Published: January 2018

Economic development gained prominence as a field of economics after World War II in relation to the prospects of what came to be called underdeveloped, decolonizing, developing, or Third World countries. The period between the 1950s and 1980s saw the emergence of various theories of economic development and policy strategies, and the growth of “development studies” reflected cross-disciplinary interest in the subject. In the early decades, women received little or no attention. If women were discussed at all in policy circles, it was in relation to their role as mothers, an approach that came to be known as the welfare or motherhood approach. The field of women in development (WID) emerged in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, women’s participation and gender dynamics have evolved as central issues in the discourse and policies of international development. Along with changes in theories and policies of economic development, WID developed with distinct or overlapping fields known as women and development (WAD), gender and development (GAD), the efficiency approach, and the empowerment approach. Several basic themes can be identified from the literature on women and gender in development, including: all societies exhibit a division of labor by sex; economic development has had a differential impact on men and women, although the impact on women has tended to be conditioned by class and ethnicity; economic policy making and institutions have a gendered nature, and the ways in which macroeconomics and the social relations of gender influence each other.
Women Teaching International Studies
Authors: Hampton Mary N. , Mahoney-Norris Kathleen A.
Published: January 2018

One aspect of women’s professional experience in the field of international studies is that of teaching. Women’s experience in the gendered classroom has been shaped by three general factors: their identity, their interests, and the institutions in which they work. Major dimensions of identity can be grouped into: identity as reputation; identity as race and sex; and identity as role models and mentors. Meanwhile, women’s teaching is clearly affected by their scholarly interests, which impact on both the subjects they choose to teach and their pedagogical approaches. While it would not be surprising to find that women teachers tend to teach more about women and feminism, a major survey of International Relations (IR) faculty in the United States found other significant differences between women and men in the classroom, often linked to women’s differing research interests. Women’s teaching is also impacted by the institutional environment in which they work. Surveys and studies across the academic spectrum confirm the importance not only of gender equity at institutions, but also the presence of an institutional climate, or culture, that is friendly to women faculty. Major elements that affect the institutional environment include the number of faculty women (including senior women); the type of institution (its focus on research or teaching); and the ability to offer feminist and gender courses, and related pedagogies.
Xenophobia and Anti-Immigrant Politics
Authors: Rensmann Lars , Miller Jennifer
Published: January 2018

The emergence of widespread xenophobia and anti-immigrant politics has raised the following questions: What are the explanatory factors and cultural conditions for the relative salience of xenophobic attitudes in the current era—and why is there a varying demand in different countries? Which independent variables on the supply side explain the emergence and the diverging success or failure of “anti-immigrant parties” as well as variations of mainstream anti-immigrant discourses and campaigns in electoral politics? What causal mechanisms can be found between contextual, structural, or agency-related factors and anti-immigrant party politics, and what do we know about their emergence and their dynamics in political processes? These questions are addressed by demand-side, supply-side, as well as mixed models. Demand-side approaches focus on the conditions that generate certain anti-immigrant attitudes and policy preferences in the electorate, on both the individual and the societal level, as key explanatory variables for anti-immigrant policies. Supply-side approaches turn to the role of political agency: They explain the salience and variation of anti-immigrant politics mainly by the performance of parties which mobilize, organize, and (as “agenda setters”) generate them. Mixed models include both sets of explanatory variables and a “third” set of institutional and discursive factors, such as electoral rules, party competition, and ideological spaces in electoral marketplaces.
“Feminist” Theoretical Inquiries and “IR”
Authors: Agathangelou Anna M. , Turcotte Heather M.
Published: January 2018

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).
Articulations of Sovereignty
Authors: Aradau Claudia
Published: January 2018

Sovereignty has been variously understood as the given principle of international relations, an institution, a social construct, a performative discourse subject to historical transformation, or a particular practice of power. The “articulations” of sovereignty refer to sovereignty as a practice that is worked on and in turn works with and against other practices. Alongside territory and supreme authority, sovereignty is characterized by the capacity to make and enforce laws. Sovereignty has also been defined in opposition to rights, as the spatiotemporal limits it instantiates are also the limits of rights. Another conceptualization of sovereignty has been revived in international relations, partly in response to the question of exclusions and limits that sovereign practices enacted. In addition, sovereignty is not inextricably tied up with the state but is articulated with heterogeneous and contradictory discourses and practices that create meaning about the international, and has consequences for the kind of community, politics, and agency that are possible. There are three effects of the logic of sovereignty in the international system: the ordering of the domestic and the international, the spatio-temporal limits to politics, and the exclusions from agency. In addition, there are three renditions of the international as a “thick” social space: those of globalization theories, of biopolitics, and of empire.
Classical Geopolitics Revisited
Authors: Dodds Klaus , Woon Chih Yuan
Published: January 2018

An exploration of the genesis of classical geopolitics lies in a conviction that location and resources are pivotal to the exercise of political power over territory. The term geopolitics was first coined in the late 1890s by the Swedish writer Rudolf Kjellén. Classical geopolitics, the term used to describe the earliest writings, was for Kjellén an intellectual field that recognised that it was “[a] science which conceives of the state as a geographical organism or as a phenomenon in space.” Later authors thought that geopolitics was more than a science. It was a way of understanding designed to signal a rather hard-nosed or realist approach to international politics. What made it reliable was its ability to generate law-like statements about the importance of the facts of physical geography, such as the distribution of landmass, the extent of the oceans, and the importance of particular, strategically located regions, in determining patterns of global political power. This article reviews in some detail the core features of this field—and interrogates a series of core ideas and principles at play. It also notes some other pertinent characteristics, such as the case that most classical geopolitical writers were committed nationalists and imperialists, under the intellectual influence of social Darwinism. The global map for these authors was fundamentally divided between the imperial great powers and the colonized world, now referred to as the Global South. Finally, these authors were convinced that they were offering a “god's eye view” of the world to fellow citizens and policy makers, uncorrupted by ideology or prejudice. The fate of classical geopolitics is uneven in the English-speaking world, in particular with a formal decline in the post-1945 period, signs of revival in the 1970s and 1980s, decline in the 1990s, and now re-emergence in a new era characterized by nationalism, nativism, populism. Animated concerns about borders and population composition and size provide fertile ground for old ideas to re-emerge about the needs of nation-states to secure their territories and peoples from others. The reader is introduced to a newer field critical geopolitics. It calls into question some of those core principles of classical geopolitics and emphasizes more the deliberate framing of space, the rejection of a hard separation between the domestic and the foreign, and it eschews the idea of the nation-state as a “living organism,” operating in a territorial container. It also draws attention to popular geopolitics, and the manner in which ideas about geography and cognate disciplines are produced and circulated through public cultures. Classical and critical geopolitics share a common concern—geography matters—but where they differ is how, where, and why geography matters.
Forced Migration, Refugees, and Asylum
Authors: El-Enany Nadine , Thielemann Eiko R.
Published: January 2018

Forced migrations, as well as the related issues of refugees and asylum, profoundly impact the relationship between the countries of origin and the countries of destination. Traditionally, the essential quality of a refugee was seen to be their presence outside of their own country as a result of political persecution. However, the historical evolution of the definition of a refugee has gradually become more restricted and defined. Commentators have challenged the current refugee protection regime along two principal lines. The first is idealist in nature and entails the argument that the refugee definition as contained in the 1951 Refugee Convention is not sufficiently broad and thus fails to protect all those individuals deserving of protection. The second line of argument is a realist one, taking a more pragmatic approach in addressing the insufficiencies of the Convention. Its advocates emphasize the importance of making refugee protection requirements more palatable to states, the actors upon which we rely to provide refugees with protection. With regard to the question of how to design more effective burden-sharing institutions, the literature has traditionally focused on finding ways to equalize refugee responsibilities directly by seeking to equalize the number of asylum seekers and refugees that states have to deal with.
Foreign Policy Analysis: Origins (1954–93) and Contestations
Authors: Hudson Valerie
Published: January 2018

A country’s foreign policy, also called its foreign relations, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve goals within its international relations (IR) milieu. The study of such strategic plans is called foreign policy analysis (FPA). The inception of foreign relations in human affairs and the need for foreign policy to deal with them is as old as the organization of human life in groups. In the twentieth century, due to global wars, international relations became a public concern as well as an important field of study and research. Gradually, various theories began to grow around international relations, international systems, and international politics, but the need for a theory of foreign policy continued to be neglected. The reason was that states used to keep their foreign policies under official secrecy and it was not considered appropriate for the public, as it is today, to know about these policies. However, although foreign policy formulation continued to remain a closely guarded process at the national level, wider access to governmental records and greater public interest provided more data for researchers to work on and, eventually, place international relations in a structured framework of political science.
Foreign Policy and the Social Construction of State Identity
Authors: Kowert Paul A.
Published: January 2018

Foreign policy analysis benefits from careful attention to state identity. After all, identity defines the field itself by making it possible to speak both of policies and of a domain that is foreign. For some scholars, identity has proven useful as a guide to agency and, in particular, to agent preferences. For others, identity has served as a guide to social or institutional structure. Theories of state identity can be divided into three categories: conditions internal to agents, social interactions among agents, and “ecological” encounters with a broader environment. Internal conditions refer to either processes or constraints that operate within the agent under consideration. In the case of the state, these may include domestic politics, the individual characteristics of citizens or other internal actors, and the collective attributes of these citizens or other actors. Although internal causes are not social at the state level, they nevertheless have social implications if they give rise to state identity, and they may themselves be social at a lower level. The social interactions of states themselves constitute a second source of identity, one that treats states as capable of interacting like persons. This approach essentially writes large social and psychological theories, replacing individuals with the state. Finally, the ecological setting or broader environment is a third possible source of identity. The environment may be material, ideational, or discursive, and treated as an objective or a subjective influence.
Foreign Policy Decision Making
Authors: Goldgeier James M.
Published: January 2018

Decision makers, acting singly or in groups, influence the field of international relations by shaping the interactions among nations. It is therefore important to understand how those decision makers are likely to behave. Some scholars have developed elegant formal theories of decision making to demonstrate the utility of rational choice approaches in the study of international relations, while others have chosen to explain the patterns of bias that exist when leaders face the difficult task of making decisions and formulating policy. Among them are Herbert Simon, who introduced “bounded rationality” to allow leaders to short-circuit the decision process, and Elizabeth Kier, who has shown how organizational cultures shaped the development of military doctrine during the interwar period. The literature on foreign policy decision making during the Cold War looked inside the black box to generate analyses of bureaucratic politics and individual mindsets. Because decision making involves consensus seeking among groups, leaders will often avoid making choices so that they will not antagonize key members of the bureaucracy. Scholars have also investigated the role of “policy entrepreneurs” in the decision-making process, bringing individual agents into organizational, diplomatic and political processes. Over time, the field of policy decision making has evolved to help us understand not only why leaders often calculate so poorly but even more importantly, why systematic patterns of behavior are more or less likely under certain conditions.
Fundamentalism and Globalization
Authors: Evcimen Gamze , Denemark Robert A.
Published: January 2018

The relationship between fundamentalism and globalization and the agency of social groups in weaving this relationship has generated a significant body of work. This growing body of literature has addressed which political-economic and sociocultural processes are associated with these processes; the manner in which this connection relates to modernity and colonialism; how paradigmatic shifts such as postcolonialism and neoliberalism brought about ruptures and reinforced continuities; and what roles new social actors and political constellations play. Related literature focuses on a broad range of processes, from global socioeconomic changes and urbanization to political constellations, global geoeconomic competition, and international migration. It includes authors who approach such multifaceted processes of fundamentalism and globalization from various perspectives. Recent scholarship also considers connections between fundamentalism and globalization and the rise of authoritarian politics in early 21st century.

This dynamic relationship between fundamentalism and globalization presents a series of challenges for both social actors and scholars. How do postmodern deconstruction and reconstruction of modernity affect both ruptures and continuities in this relationship? In what ways does the rise of right-wing politics in early 21st century relate to phenomena such as Christian nationalism and Islamophobia as new forms of fundamentalism? How do the rise of the middle classes and new political-economic constellations relate to similar processes in the Global South? What kind of religious discourses and practices enable the sacralization of neoliberalism? Fundamentalism and globalization should be considered as inextricably embedded in social processes and practices that are both shaped by and actively shaping existing power relations.
Intelligence Cooperation
Authors: Crawford Timothy W.
Published: January 2018

Intelligence cooperation (or liaison) refers to the sharing or exchange of politically useful secret information between states, which may also work together to produce or procure such information. There are many important connections between the key concerns of intelligence cooperation and the cooperation problems and solutions illuminated in mainstream traditions of international relations theory (realism, liberalism, and constructivism), and work on bureaucratic and organizational politics. These are captured in a descriptive typology that breaks down intelligence cooperation relationships into four classes, reflecting the number of states and quality of reciprocity involved. Those are transactional bilateral cooperation, relational bilateral cooperation, transactional multilateral cooperation, and relational multilateral cooperation. Across these categories, the most important concepts, conjectures, and conundrums of intelligence cooperation are found.
Race(ing) International Relations: A Critical Overview of Postcolonial Feminism in International Relations
Authors: Chowdhry Geeta , Ling L.H.M.
Published: January 2018

Postcolonial feminism in international relations (PFIR) is a disciplinary field devoted to the study of world politics as a site of power relations shaped by colonization. PFIR combines postcolonial and feminist insights to explore questions such as how the stratum of elite power intersects with subterranean layers of colonization to produce our contemporary world politics; how these interrelationships between race, gender, sex, and class inform matrices of power in world politics; and how we account for elite and subaltern agency and resistance to the hegemonic sphere of world politics. PFIR is similar to Marxism, constructivism, and postmodernism in that they all posit that the masses underwrite hegemonic rule and, in so doing, ultimately have the means to do away with it. One difference is that PFIR emanates from the position of the subaltern; more specifically, the colonized’s colonized such as women, children, the illiterate, the poor, the landless, and the voiceless. Three major components are involved in PFIR in its analysis of world politics: culture, politics, and material structures. Also, eight common foci emerge in PFIR: intersectionality, representation, and power; materiality; relationality; multiplicity; intersubjectivity; contrapuntality; complicity; and resistance and accountability. PFIR gives rise to two interrelated projects: an empirical inquiry into the construction and exercise of power in daily life, and theory building that reflects this empirical base. A future challenge for PFIR is to elucidate how we can transform, not just alleviate, the hegemonies that persist around the world.
Regional Governance and Environmental Problems
Authors: Balsiger Jörg , VanDeveer Stacy D.
Published: January 2018

Only recently has international environmental politics scholarship focused more explicitly on “regionalism” as a distinct phenomenon, one which has received much more sustained attention among specialists in international security and international political economy. By the early twenty-first century, regional environmental governance had become commonplace. Since the term “region” has had different connotations in different disciplines, the analytic and empirical scope of studies of regional environmental governance has varied considerably. As such, analyses of regional environmental cooperation have incorporated both constructivist views of regions that transcend the nation-state grid, and rescaling arguments placing greater emphasis on subnational governments, transboundary mobilization, and the importance of ecoregional initiatives. Regional agreements increasingly point to some sort of ecoterritoriality, state actors are increasingly complemented by nonstate or substate actors, and the thematic scope increasingly expands beyond purely environmental issues to encompass broader notions of sustainable development. There are three typical types of regional agreements: interstate regional environmental governance, ecoregional environmental governance, and ecoregional sustainable development governance. Interstate regional environmental governance is most typical of regional economic organizations with an environmental mandate that covers single or multiple environmental issues. Meanwhile, ecoregional environmental governance is widely seen in agreements for mountain ranges, regional seas, or river basins. Case studies on marine and mountain regional environmental governance illustrate that various regional arrangement remain in quite different states of institutionalization. Yet they also illustrate the growth of ecoregionalism in transnational environmental governance.
The Development Paradigm and Its Critics
Authors: Mittelman James H.
Published: January 2018

Development cannot be separated from global political economy, but it is an inherent component of the latter. The concept of development was popularized through expansion of colonization, and underwent various transformations as the socio-political structure of the world changed over time. Thus, the central task of development theory is to determine and explain why some countries are underdeveloped and how these countries can develop. Such theories draw on a variety of social science disciplines and approaches. Accordingly, different development paradigms have emerged upon which different scholars have shown profound interests and to which they gave extensive criticisms—modernization, dependency, Marxism, postcolonialism, and globalization. With the recent emergence of the post-modern critique of development, power has become an important subject in the discourse of development. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of the relations between power and development is still in its fledgling stage. Though highly apparent in human societies, social power per se is a polylithic discourse with no unified definition and implication, which has led different proponents of development paradigms to understand power differently. Although there is a dialectic contradiction between the different dialogic paradigms, the reality of development theory is that there is a large choice of theories and models from which field practicioners will draw pragmatically the most appropriate elements, or they will create their own model adapted to the situation.
Women and Publishing in International Studies
Authors: Breuning Marijke
Published: January 2018

A gender disparity in publishing hinders the ability of women to advance their careers in academia. A review of the literature shows that there is little published research on the status of women in international studies. Women’s access to, and progress in, the field of international studies has also been slower than many have thought. Feminist approaches to international relations emerged later compared to other subfields of political science, at around the end of the Cold War. Data suggests that there has not been substantial growth in the proportion of women in international studies since the mid-1990s: the data of Tétreault et al. (1997) reported 31.2 percent women for 1994 and Breuning et al. (2005) calculated that there were 31.8 percent women in the International Studies Association in 2004. With each successive rank on the academic career ladder, the percentage of women becomes smaller. In 2006, women accounted for 36 percent of the assistant professors in political science, but only 28 percent of the associate professors and just 17 percent of full professors. Some women—especially those engaged with the research communities on women and/or gender in international studies—have found high-quality outlets in journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. However, women whose work does not focus on those research communities are unlikely to benefit from the existence of these journals.
Feminist Security Theorizing
Authors: Sjoberg Laura
Published: January 2018

Feminist Security Theorizing is in many ways what it sounds like—thinking about security in the global political arena through gender lenses. Since early work in feminist International Relations (IR), feminists have been exploring research questions about the ways that gender shapes and is shaped by war, conflict, and militarism. The field has developed to be labeled Feminist Security Studies (FSS). Debates about whether FSS is “feminist security” studies or feminist “security studies” have asked about the subfield’s focus—whether it is toward rethinking security in feminist ways or toward the mainstream field of security studies as such. With space in the field for both approaches, feminist security theorizing has looked at revealing the importance of gender in conceptualizing security, demonstrating that gender is key to understanding causes and predicting outcomes, and showing gender as a key part of solving security problems. FSS has several common theoretical commitments and concerns. These include a necessary commitment to intersectionality, a recognition of the importance of theorizing not only about gender but also about sexuality, a consciousness about framing, and an awareness of the politics of sociology of the academic disciplines in which it is situated. It is important to explore the past, present, and potential futures of feminist theorizing about security, concluding with an invitation to expand recognition of feminist work addressing security issues across an even wider variety of perspectives.
Forests and Desertification
Authors: Wagner Lynn M. , Davenport Deborah
Published: January 2018

Both desertification and forest policies address environmental issues related to land. However, the types of land covered and the ways the issues associated with that land are conceptualized represent opposite ends of a spectrum, with the former policy area focusing on land degradation in areas with limited biodiversity and the latter relating to protection of lands comprising some of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. Moreover, despite their common denominator as issues related to land, the international studies literatures on desertification and forests, like the international policy responses to them, have taken different paths. A number of United Nations (UN)-backed research efforts have sought to define the concept, assess the impacts, and identify possible actions to address the desertification phenomenon. International studies scholarship has also focused on transformations in international policy approaches to deserts, such as the implementation of certain plans of action. Forests, meanwhile, have received renewed attention at the international policy-making level, due to the fact that even though forests themselves fall within the jurisdiction of sovereign states. Historically, deforestation the world over has been associated with conversion of land for agriculture and human settlement. In recent decades, this has been particularly the case in developing countries, though recent deforestation trends have also been traced back to the current global economic system that encourages privatization of forestland.
Gender and Global Security
Authors: Hudson Valerie , Carpenter R. Charli , Caprioli Mary
Published: January 2018

It is not only gender ambiguity that is securitized in the international arena, but femininity as well. Some scholars argue that conflict over what women are and what they should do is characterized as a risk to national/global security. Meanwhile, there are those who would characterize gender as irrelevant to, or is one of many variables, in thinking about “security.” Feminist international relations (IR) scholars, however, have argued that gender is across all areas of international security, and that gender analysis is transformative of security studies. A redefinition of security in feminist terms that reveals gender as a factor at play can uncover uncomfortable truths about the reality of this world; how the “myth of protection” is a lie used to legitimize war; and how discourse in international politics is constructed of dichotomies and that their deconstruction could lead to benefits for the human race. Feminist work asserts that it is inadequate to define, analyze, or account for security without reference to gender subordination, particularly, the dichotomy of the domination/subordination concept of power. Gender subordination can be found in military training routines that refer to underperforming men as “girls,” or in the use of rape and forced impregnation as weapons of war. It is the traditional sense of “power as dominance” that leads to situations such as the security dilemma.
Global Indigenous Rights and Resistance
Authors: Natividad Nicholas D. , Lauderdale Pat
Published: January 2018

It is estimated that there are more than 470 million Indigenous people spread across 90 countries worldwide, making up more than 6% of the world’s population. Significant advancements in global Indigenous rights have occurred in modern international law since the early 20th century. The establishment of the League of Nations provided an early framework for notions of self-governance, and the establishment of the United Nations in the mid-20th century prompted the rise of Indigenous rights to be situated within the framework of international human rights law. Human rights law emerged from the need expressed in the 1945 UN Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to protect and secure the fundamental freedoms and rights of all humans. The first recognition of Indigenous peoples in the international legal order came with the 1957 International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 107. Since the first recognition, there have been numerous advancements in the establishment of rights for Indigenous populations, most notably the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the International Decades of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, and the International Year for the World’s Indigenous People, as well as in areas of Indigenous cultural heritage and cultural rights. A world-systems approach to Indigenous rights sheds light on contradictory nature of rights, namely, that the rise of human rights has dovetailed with neoliberal globalization under the law. The connection between market fundamentalism and the expansion of human rights has been met with resistance by Indigenous peoples who have provided alternative realities, ways of social organizing, and protection of land and environment that center Indigenous ways of knowing and being. As a result, Indigenous rights have been shaped by the Indigenous peoples teaching the rest of the world the importance of moving away from “individual rights” and toward mutual responsibility and obligation.
Intelligence Analysis: Once Again
Authors: Mangio Charles A. , Wilkinson Bonnie J.
Published: January 2018

Intelligence analysis is defined as analysis carried out by intelligence organizations. The essence of intelligence analysis is determining the meaning of information to develop knowledge and understanding. The meaning derived from the analysis is used to address many different types of questions, which are categorized in variety of ways. A general classification of the questions, sometimes described as types of intelligence or analysis, includes strategic intelligence. The seminal publication for describing and explaining the processes and attributes of strategic intelligence is Sherman Kent’s 1949 book, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy. The intelligence literature acknowledges that determining meaning is influenced by the analyst’s mindset, mental model, or frame of mind. A variety of factors influence mental models, including context and purpose, past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, organizational norms and the specifics of the information received. A recurring theme in intelligence literature is the use of scientific methods in intelligence analysis and the discussion of the analytic process in terms of scientific methods. Key elements of the analysis processes include hypotheses, information research, and the marshaling of evidence, and how they affect the determination of meaning. Intelligence research also emphasizes the importance of rigor in analytic thinking. Despite the accumulation of a substantial amount of scholarly work on intelligence since the 1940s and 1950s, the literature has not advanced on the core aspect of determining meaning from information to address the full range of complexities in intelligence analysis.
Labor in the Global System
Authors: Hassel Anke , Hensen Henni , Sander Anne
Published: January 2018

In the course of globalization, the locus of labor regulation has increasingly shifted toward the supranational level. However, the debate on global labor standards continues to be riddled by the question of the relationship between economic globalization and labor standards. This debate can be outlined along two main arguments: the liberal perspective, which sees a positive impact of globalization on working conditions worldwide, is opposed by those who claim a negative impact leading to a race to the bottom—a hypothesis based on the assumption that the liberalization of the international economic order intensifies competition, sharpens the fight for competitive advantages, and subsequently contributes to a downward spiral in wages and labor standards. In sum, the argument is that the effect of increased global competition leads to a growing worldwide inequality between high-skilled and low-skilled workers. One of the most significant new features of the internationalizing economy is labor migration. Low-qualified workers often migrate into hazardous conditions as they are not adequately integrated and protected in their host countries. Meanwhile, there are two major contested issues in the global labor governance debate: the debate around soft versus hard law and the relationship between labor rights and human rights. With the growing academic debate on international labor, a growing body of regulatory organizations and instruments has developed. Global labor is structured along three main lines: international (governmental) organizations and international standard setting; transnational labor movements and tripartite mechanisms; and private regulatory instruments such as Codes of Conduct (CoC) and multistakeholder initiatives.
Methodological Developments in Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Migration Research
Authors: Asal Victor , Shellman Stephen , Howard Tiffiany
Published: January 2018

In terms of methods, researchers working in nationalism, ethnicity, and migration have used everything from broad historical narratives to automated coding and event data analysis. Traditionally, narratives were the dominant methodological approach implemented to study these areas. The narrative approach allowed for explication of groundbreaking theoretical arguments generating testable hypotheses, the deep inspection of particular areas of the world or particular issues with richness of detail and process, and the investigation of a small number of cases. In addition, the use of formal theory to explore issues related to nationalism, ethnicity, and migration also has a long tradition. Formal theory allows for the construction of concise decision making models that force the researcher to be explicit about key assumptions made regarding preferences and the political structure involved. The formal theory approach has encouraged greater specificity from the arguments formed by scholars of nationalism, ethnicity, and immigration and has generated important theoretical insights. Finally, the most rapidly expanding approach to the study of nationalism, ethnicity, and immigration over the past two decades has been statistics. Statistical analyses offer the advantage of being able to bracket confidence intervals around the causal inferences one makes and to more formally control for a variety of competing factors. As statistical technology and training have become more common, the use of statistics has grown substantially.
Microfinance and Social Performance
Authors: Gravesteijn Robin , Copestake James
Published: January 2018

Microfinance refers to an array of financial services—including loans, savings, and insurance—available to poor entrepreneurs and small business owners who have no collateral and, otherwise, would not qualify for a standard bank loan. Those who promote microfinance generally believe that such access will help poor people out of poverty. For many, microfinance is a way to promote economic development, employment, and growth through the support of micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses; for others, it is a way for the poor to manage their finances more effectively and take advantage of economic opportunities while managing the risks. One of the newer fields that is getting more attention within microfinance is the measure of microfinance institutions’ (MFIs) social performance, which broadly is an indication of how well an MFI meets the social goals outlined in its mission and vision. Social performance is reflected in a wide range of indicators, including an MFI’s policies towards employees, like providing health care or maternity leave; to what degree an MFI targets the poorest of the poor for financial services; an MFI’s policies on environmental conservation; how low an MFI keeps its interest rates; how transparent an MFI is about these interest rates and other loan terms; and how an MFI’s services translate into improved lives for their clients.
Political Psychology, Cognition, and Foreign Policy Analysis
Authors: Rosati Jerel , Miller Colleen E.
Published: January 2018

Cognitive psychology highlights the constraints that prevent individuals from acting as utility-maximizing, fully rational decision-makers. These constraints lead people to rely on a regularly occurring set of cognitive mechanisms to simplify the decision-making process. Scholars of foreign policy have drawn from several prominent areas of cognitive psychology to inform their research. One such area looks at the beliefs and belief systems that are the building blocks for most judgments. Researchers have also examined how actors use cognitive biases and heuristics to cope with uncertainty, which is abundant in foreign policy settings. An important set of cognitive mechanisms examined in foreign policy analysis (FPA) relates to judgments about policy risks and costs. In order to make inferences and predictions about behavior concerning voting decision, certain key public influences must be considered. These influences include the role of emotions, political socialization, political sophistication, tolerance of diversity of political views, and the media. The effect of these influences on voting behavior is best understood through theories on the formation of attitudes, beliefs, schema, knowledge structures, and the practice of information processing. The degree to which voting decision is affected by internal processing systems of political information alters the quality of making truly democratic decisions.
Power and Space in Electronic Communications
Authors: Steinberg Philip E. , Purcell Darren
Published: January 2018

Electronic communications refer to forms of communication where ideas and information are embedded in spatially mobile electronic signals. These include the internet, telephony, television, and radio. Electronic communications are linked to state power in a complex and, at times, contradictory manner. More specifically, a tension exists between divergent pressures toward constructing electronic communication spaces as spaces of state power, as spaces of escape, and as spaces for contesting state power. On the one hand, states often invest in infrastructure and empower regulatory institutions as they seek to intensify their presence within national territory, for example, or project their influence beyond territorial borders. The widespread use of electronic communication technologies to facilitate governmental power is especially evident in the realm of cyberwarfare. E-government platforms have also been created to foster interaction with the state through electronic means. On the other hand, communication systems thrive through the idealization (and, ideally, the regulatory construction) of a space without borders, whereby individuals might bypass, or even actively work to subvert, state authority. Just as the internet has been seen as a means for state power to monitor the everyday lives and subjectivities of the citizenry, it has also been employed as a tool for democratization. Various institutions have emerged to govern specific electronic communication networks, including those that are focused on reproducing the power of individual states, those that operate in the realm of intergovernmental organizations, those that devolve power to actors in local government, and those that empower corporations or civil society.
Security Practices
Authors: Balzacq Thierry , Basaran Tugba , Bigo Didier , Guittet Emmanuel-Pierre , Olsson Christian
Published: January 2018

Practices refer to collective and historic acts that shaped the evolution of the fundamental distinction used to define the field of security—that of internal vs. external security. In general, security practices relate to two kinds of tools through which professionals of (in)security think about a threat: regulatory tools, which seek to “normalize” the behavior of target individuals (for example, policy regulation, constitution), and capacity tools, specific modalities for imposing external discipline upon individuals and groups. The roots of the distinction between internal and external security are embedded in a historical process of competition over where to draw the line between the authority and limits of diverse agencies. Much of the international relations (IR) literature ignores the diversity of security practices, and reduces security to an IR problem detached from other bodies of knowledge. This is an error that needs to be corrected. Security and insecurity must be analyzed not only as a process but also as the same process of (in)securitization. The term “security” cannot be considered as a concept capable of capturing a coherent set of practices, but rather the result of a process of (in)securitization. Research on security practices opens a variety of promising paths, but at least three challenges need to be met before this potential can be realized: a sustained development of cross-disciplinary studies; address the “sacrifice” entailed in definitions of security; and more time to elucidating as clearly as possible processes of resistance from those who are the target of these practices.
Strategic Relationships in Post-Communist Foreign Policies
Authors: Strakes Jason E. , Molchanov Mikhail A. , Galbreath David J.
Published: January 2018

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the relationships of elite/citizen preferences and strategies—and its consequent impact on the perceived role of their countries in the greater international system—it is necessary to put an emphasis on interactions within and across contrasting areas of the formerly communist world. Until recently, the systematic investigation of foreign policy-making processes has been a relatively neglected dimension within the general domain of post-communist studies. During the mid-to-late 1990s, various scholars addressed ideological redefinition in post-communist states. Other scholars have addressed the foreign policy trajectory of the newly independent states from the perspective of governance, institutional structure, and state capacity. Among the analytic tools that have been adopted to evaluate the international activities of post-communist states in recent years is the burgeoning concept of “multi-vector” foreign policy. However, due to the vast cross-regional scope and complexity of the former Soviet region, it has become more analytically useful to identify this group of countries in terms of their location in separate and respective geographic subregions. Two regional overviews provide a synthesis of the four analytic foci: national identity, political transition, rationality, and regionalism. The first offers an assessment of the foreign policy decisions and strategies of the Baltic republics since 1990–1. The second evaluates the foreign relations between the Russian Federation and the five independent republics of Central Asia.