bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Teaching International Relations Theory
Authors: Albert Craig Douglas
Published: January 2018

International relations (IR) theory is favorably described in almost every syllabus since 1930. The most important questions asked were: “What is theory?” and “Is there a reason for IR theory?” The most widely used texts all focus on the first question and suggest, among others, that IR theory is “a way of making the world or some part of it more intelligible or better understood.” We can gauge where the teaching of IR theory is today by analyzing a sample of syllabi from IR scholars serving on the Advisory Board of the International Studies Association’s (ISA) Compendium Project. These syllabi reveal some trends. Within the eight undergraduate syllabi, for example, a general introduction to IR theory is taught in four separate classes. Among the theories discussed in different classes are realism, classical realism, neo-realism, Marxism and neo-Marxism, world-systems theory, imperialism, constructivism, and international political economy. Novel methods for teaching IR theory include the use of films, active learning, and experiential learning. The diversity of treatments of IR theory implied by the ISA syllabi provides evidence that, with the exception of the proliferation of perspectives, relatively little has changed since the debates of the late 1930s. The discipline lacks much semblance of unity regarding whether, and how, to offer IR theory to students. Nevertheless, there have been improvements that are likely to continue in terms of the ways in which theories may be presented.
Teaching International Relations With Case Studies
Authors: Carter Ralph G.
Published: January 2018

Case-based learning offers several advantages in the study of international relations. For instructors, the primary attraction of case-based learning is its emphasis on active student engagement. Rather than reading the assigned material, passively listening to lectures, and memorizing notes, students are drawn into more active roles as their classroom instructors ask questions and require student participation. For students, case-based learning connects course material to the real world beyond the classroom. Regardless of the nature of the case or its source, instructors can take steps to ensure success with a case-based approach. First, instructors should know the details of the case: the background, the facts and events, the issues, the participants, and the results. Second, instructors should ensure that the physical setting of the classroom is appropriate for the anticipated task. Third, instructors should be attentive to the size of the class. Small classes promote participation by more students. Finally, instructors can be attentive to the possibility of pairing cases for comparative discussion and analysis. The success of case-based learning also rests in students' awareness that that passivity on their part is unacceptable. Thus, instructors must be sure that they convey the expectation that students must come to class ready to participate. Some common problems associated with case-based learning include time management, silence or apathy on the part of the students, and the failed class.
Teaching with Media
Authors: Kuchinsky Michael
Published: January 2018

Various media sources are available to enhance the teaching of international affairs, including literature, film, political cartoons, television programming, newspapers, music, and blogs and other internet-driven resources. Literature has perhaps the longest history as an alternative media resource. The arguments in favor of using literature for teaching international affairs focus on engaging students and livening up their learning experience. Film and video resources can enhance knowledge of international relations by dramatizing and personalizing abstract ideas as well as ordinary events. Films also impact student learning because of their emotional appeal. Cartoons as political expression deserve attention because their significant place in forming public opinion and debate. Although the use of television programming in teaching international affairs appears rarely in the literature, one can consider several current and past popular programs that carried significant political content. These include the European-produced miniseries Traffic that graphically depicted the international political economy of opium, and the syndicated television comedy M*A*S*H, which has raised many questions regarding the pursuit and effects of war. Music and politics frequently mix, as seen in the importance of a national anthem or the political spectacle that unfolds in Olympic Games. Digital online sources and materials push the classroom experience away from linear input–output models and toward information network communities where inputs enter from anywhere.
Teaching with Technology: Active Learning in International Studies
Authors: Jackson Steven F.
Published: January 2018

The adoption of new technologies in instruction will change the nature of instruction itself. There are four broad categories of the potential benefits of technology in higher education: off-loading; enhanced resources; enriched conventional class lecture/discussion; and outreach through distance education. Other college and university administrators have seen technology as either a money-saving or money-making tool for their institutions. The technologies most commonly associated with pedagogy include desktop software, internet-mediated communications, World Wide Web pages, distance education courseware, internet access to statistical databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), cellphone and personal digital assistant applications, and classroom response systems (CRS). There has been a modest and somewhat sporadic literature on teaching with technology in international studies, much of which follows the development of new technologies, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, and courseware development. The three major themes in the scholarship on technology in teaching and learning in international studies include technology-based enthusiasm/experimentation, comparative studies, and skepticism. However, some of the challenges to scholarship in teaching and learning with technology: the use of technology has become so pervasive, accepted, and easy that few teacher-scholars bother to write in scholarly journals about the act; weak structure of incentives for studying the use of technology in teaching and learning; and technological instability and discontinuity. Nevertheless, there are some technologies and trends that may appear in the future international relations course. These include podcasting, Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds, Twittering, and Wikipeda and Google Books.
Technology and International Relations
Authors: Krishna-Hensel Sai Felicia
Published: January 2018

Throughout history, technology has played a significant role in international relations (IR). Technological development is an important factor underlying much of humanity’s social, economic, and political development, as well as in interstate and interregional relationships. Beginning with the earliest tool industries of the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods to the present time, technology has been an integral component of the transformative processes that resulted in the organization, expansion, and establishment of distinctive societies. The presence or absence of equal access to technology has often determined the nature of relationships between societies and civilizations. Technology increases the options available to policymakers in their pursuit of the goals of the state, but also complicates their decision making. The question of whether, and how much, technological change has influenced IR has been the subject of considerable debate. Scholars are divided on the emphasis that should be placed on technological progress as an independent variable in the study of relations between states and as a factor in analyzing power configurations in the international system. Among the scientific and technological revolutions that are believed to have contributed to the changing nature of power and relations between states are transportation and communication, the industrial revolution, the nuclear revolution, and the contemporary information revolution. Future research should focus on how these technological changes are going to influence the debates on power, deterrence, diplomacy, and other instruments of IR.
Liberal Perspectives on the Global Political Economy
Authors: Paul Darel E.
Published: January 2018

Liberal international political economy (IPE) is the offspring of a marriage between mainstream international economics with its focus on markets and mainstream international relations with its emphasis on the state. While clearly involving the traditional disciplines of economics and political science, liberal scholarship in IPE tends to be housed almost exclusively in the latter. Liberal IPE has always maintained a special relationship with its absentee father economics, looking to it particularly as a source of theoretical and especially methodological inspiration. In its earlier phase, the “American school” of IPE, also known by its practitioners as Open Economy Politics (OEP), was strongly oriented toward studying the societal determinants of state trade policy and indeed continues to expand upon this terrain. OEP has moved into many diverse areas since then. Having roots in both neoclassical economics and realist international relations theory, OEP has a strong tendency to limit its empirical interest to observable behavior, define interest in strictly material terms, and assume the psychology of decision-making to be rational and therefore unproblematic. Unsurprisingly, OEP has little room for ideas as interesting and important objects of study, and in turn some of the early pioneers of the liberal approach in IPE have lamented its becoming “too materialistic.”
The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics and Central Figures in the English School
Authors: Epp Roger
Published: January 2018

Considerations of the English School and of its central concept—international society—have all too often neglected the most logical starting point: the internal history of the British Committee. The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics was a group of scholars created in 1959 under the chairmanship of the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield that met periodically in Cambridge, Oxford, London, and Brighton to discuss the principal problems and a range of aspects of the theory and history of international relations. The British Committee stands out as a remarkable and unusual intellectual project. A product of its place and time and of a particular academic culture, it did not pretend to represent the full range of British thinking. Its membership intentionally omitted such major figures as E.H. Carr and C.A.W. Manning. Whatever direct influence it had on contemporary British scholarship in international relations can be attributed partly to bonds of friendship, across generations, and to the performances of individual members in the lecture hall. Though the Committee incubated a good deal of its members’ work, sometimes published posthumously, its collaborative output was never prolific. Only two collective works can be attributed to it: Diplomatic Investigations (1966) and The Expansion of International Society (1984). However, the Committee developed a thorough study of international society and the nature of world politics, which has had an important impact that continues in the present day.
The Colonial Encounter and Its Legacy
Authors: Mota-Lopes José da
Published: January 2018

The current scholarship on European colonialism may be divided into two approaches: colonial studies, sometimes referred to as a political-economy approach, and postcolonial studies, also known as “postcolonialism” or “subaltern studies.” Whereas the field of colonial studies appeared with the emergence of colonialism, the second emerged with decolonization, the national liberation armed struggles, and the political, formal, or institutional collapse of colonialism. The two approaches became or appeared as protests against very similar circumstances and critically complemented one another, but they soon tended to follow parallel and very different trajectories. Three basic conceptual references offer important insights not only about the geostrategic, historical, and socioeconomic trajectories of colonialism but also on its cultural evolvement and its present consequences: colonial encounter, colonial situation, and colonial legacy. In addition, the field of colonial or postcolonial studies today may give rise to three major evolvements in the near future. The first consists in the recovery of what started to be the initial subject matter of postcolonialism. The second arises from the requirement of a return to the political, historical, and economic origins of postcolonialist studies. Finally, it will perhaps be at the point of conjunction of world-systems analysis with postcolonial studies that a fundamental problem affecting our world will find the beginning of a possible solution. The combined application of world-systems analysis and postcolonial studies is a promising intellectual instrument for confronting the in-depth influence of Eurocentrism or Euro-American universalism in the current practice and teaching of the social sciences.
The Global and the Local
Authors: Doty Roxanne Lynn
Published: January 2018

The connections between the local and the global raise a range of issues that have been addressed in social and political theory in the past but continue to provoke important discussion. Many of the constructs that have traditionally been foundational to the academic discipline of international relations, including territory and sovereignty, are inherently intertwined with how we think of the local and the global. The local–global connections revolve around three broad and overlapping themes: the critical scrutiny of older concepts and the emergence of new ones as well as alternative vocabularies; an appreciation of the necessity of an interdisciplinary perspective; and attention to the significance of the relationship between theory and practice. Many of the more recent scholarly work on the local–global continue to tackle the effects of global capitalism in locations constructed as local as well as the role of these locations in facilitating global capitalist relations. Critical geographers and cultural studies scholars have made important contributions to our understandings of the global–local nexus by focusing on the formation of social movements and localized practices of resistance as well as transversal struggles that call into question conventional spatial logics. Another important area of research that has made both conceptual and empirical contributions has produced the “global cities” literature. Students of international studies need to continue to focus on what have been referred to as “everyday” or “local” practices that have often been considered unimportant when it comes to the “big” issues of international studies.
The Role of Geographic Education in International Studies
Authors: Shelley Fred
Published: January 2018

Geography has been a formal academic discipline in the United States since the early twentieth century. During the first six or so decades of this period, geographic education was dominated by the legacies of environmental determinism and orientalism. These concepts were representative of a Eurocentric worldview that showed contempt for non-Western cultures and economies, treating “natives” of non-Western cultures as backward, ignorant, and lazy. Presentation of material about non-Western areas of the world in geography textbooks and publications has been characterized by assumptions of Western cultural superiority. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw geographic education undergo considerable transition, as geographers pay more and more attention to perspectives like dependency theory and world system theory. Renewed interest in geographic education coincided with the revival of geography as an intellectual pursuit and recognition of the importance of place in the world economy and in international relations, along with the explosive growth of information made possible by television, the internet, and other technologies. More importantly, the orientalist biases that have historically characterized geographic education in the United States and other Western countries have gradually disappeared. It has been argued that improved geographic education will help overcome geographic illiteracy and promote public awareness of international relations, but such awareness must be intertwined with the changing role of educational institutions in managing information, and to recognition of the changing relationships between education and information.
Theoretical Approaches to International Organization
Authors: Jönsson Christer
Published: January 2018

The study of international organizations (IOs) has been described as lacking theoretical depth. However, the field actually has a more solid theoretical foundation than some of its critics allege. Moreover, the variety of approaches has entailed multifaceted knowledge of the internal workings as well as the global effects of IOs. Three theoretical traditions have emerged, dealing with institutions, organization, and governance. Institutional analysis has a central position in political science. In the study of domestic institutions, three major schools—rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism—have emerged. Organization theory represents a change of focus from the ideational structures studied by institutionalists to more material and human structures. Whereas both institutional and organizational approaches were originally formulated for domestic structures, institutionalists have been more receptive to exploring domestic-international analogies and contrasts. Even if both institutional and organization theories pay attention to process— institutionalizing rules and practices as well as organizing collective entities are long-term processes— IO studies inspired by these approaches tend to focus on relatively stable structures, asking questions concerning the establishment, persistence or change, and impact of international institutions and organizations. A third, more recent perspective focuses on continuous processes of governance, involving international organizations as well as other types of actors.
Transnational Human Rights Networks: Significance and Challenges
Authors: Schmitz Hans Peter
Published: January 2018

Transnational human rights networks refer to a form of cross-border collective action that seeks to promote compliance with universally accepted norms. Principled transnational activism began to draw sustained scholarly attention after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the creation of a new type of information-driven and impartial transnational activism, embodied in organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Scholarship on transnational human rights networks emerged during the 1990s within the subfield of International Relations and as a challenge to the state-centric and materialist bias of the field. In their 1998 book Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink describe the key role that transnational human rights groups play in global affairs. Focusing on rights-based activism, Keck and Sikkink show how transnational advocacy networks (TANs) can influence domestic politics. The concept of TANs is dominated by the purposeful activism of nongovernmental organizations and driven by shared principles, not professional standards. A number of studies have challenged the core assumptions about the effectiveness of principled human rights activism, arguing that international support plays no significant role compared to the autonomous efforts of domestic activists. One way to overcome these challenges and criticisms is for the transnational activist sector, as well as other types of non-state actors, to move beyond the principles/interests dichotomy and take a closer look at the internal dynamics of participant NGOs.
Treaty Law: New Trends
Authors: Cronin Bruce
Published: January 2018

Treaties are agreements between sovereign states, and occasionally between states and international organizations. Treaties can include conventions, covenants, charters, and statutes, all of which are legally binding under international law. There are two main types of treaties: bilateral and multilateral. Bilateral agreements are concluded by a limited number of states (usually two), and typically address a narrow set of issues that are unique to specific parties and particular circumstances. Multilateral treaties, on the other hand, establish generalized principles of conduct that apply to a wide range of states without regard to the future particularistic interests of the parties or the strategic exigencies that may exist in a particular occurrence. Treaties can serve a wide variety of functions: ending wars and establishing conditions for peace; creating new international organizations or alliances; generating new rules of coexistence and cooperation; regulating a particular type of behavior; distributing resources; and initiating new rights and obligations for future relations. No single organization or agency has the authority to enforce treaty commitment. Rather, treaties can be enforced in at least two ways. First, states can use diplomatic, economic, and/or military coercion. Second, some treaties establish their own enforcement mechanisms; for example Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter grants enforcement authority to the Security Council.
United States Intelligence Cultures
Authors: Bean Hamilton
Published: January 2018

Organizational culture refers to the constellation of values, beliefs, identities, and artifacts that both shape and emerge from the interactions among the formal members of the US intelligence community. It is useful for understanding interagency cooperation and information sharing, institutional reform, leadership, intelligence failure, intelligence analysis, decision making, and intelligence theory. Organizational culture is also important in understanding the dynamics of US intelligence. There are four “levels” of, or “perspectives” on, organizational culture: vernacular and mundane organizational communication; strategic and reflective discourse; theoretical discourse; and metatheoretical discourse. Meanwhile, four overarching claims can be made about the intelligence studies literature in relation to organizational culture. First, explicit references to organizational culture within the literature do not appear until the 1970s. Second, studies of organizational culture usually critique “differentiation” among the subcultures of a single agency—most often the CIA or the FBI. Third, few intelligence scholars have provided audiences with opportunities to hear the voices of the men and women working inside these agencies. Finally, the majority of this literature views organizational culture from the dominant, managerial perspective. Ultimately, this literature evidences four themes that map to traditionally functionalist assumptions about organizational culture: (1) a differentiated or fragmented culture diminishes organizational effectiveness, while (2) an integrated or unified culture promotes effectiveness; (3) senior officials can and should determine organizational culture; and (4) the US intelligence community should model its culture after those found in private sector corporations or institutions such as law or medicine.
Wars for Ethnic or Nationalist Supremacy
Authors: Johnson Kristin P. , Rundlett Ashlea
Published: January 2018

Conflicts that occur along ethnic or nationalist lines are often the most protracted, violent, and difficult to resolve in the long term. Civil wars are often divided into two distinct types: ethnic/religious wars (identity), and revolutionary wars (nonidentity). The distinction between these conflict types is based on whether cleavages within a society occur along ethnic lines or along lines that cut across ethnic divisions and are focused on issues including class, ideology, or seeking significant policy orientation of change. The most significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of ethnic conflicts in recent years come from the disaggregation of civil wars focusing on micro- and group-level dynamics. This disaggregation supports theoretical advancement and a departure from using macro-level data with micro-level mechanisms supports transition from a monadic to dyadic study of ethnic conflict, and supports examination of potential causal mechanisms of ethnic violence. Scholarly traditions and theoretical approaches explaining identity mobilization along ethnic or nationalist lines, the contributing factors that explain the transition from mobilization to the exercise of political violence, the duration of identity-based conflicts, and the long-term prospects for settlement of the conflict have enjoyed a proliferation of studies using newly available data featuring subnational units. These include explanations of conflicts based in sociological foundations focused on the formation and maintenance of identity, structural explanations for internal conflict focus on the capacity of the state and the distribution of political authority within a political system, and the opportunity for rebellion.
What is Development?
Authors: Esteva Gustavo
Published: January 2018

Development was born as aid, an expression of the modern obsession with “caring” used by disabling professions and the service industry. However, by 1980, it was already clear that there was no correlation between aid and economic growth, and that aid was an obstacle for social transformation. Development was also born in the context of the Cold War. For President Truman, the American way of life was a democratic and egalitarian ideal to overcome the communist “threat” by closing the gap between industrial and “underdeveloped” countries. In addition, development was a reaction to the initiatives of the colonized world, increasingly challenging Western domination. Since Truman, development has connoted at least one thing: to escape from the vague, indefinable, and undignified condition known as underdevelopment. However, the Age of Development—the historical period formally inaugurated in 1949—is now coming to an end. The future of development studies lies in archaeology, to explore the ruins it left behind by looking at development’s pre-history and conceptual history, as well as the development enterprise. Since the 1970s, new campaigns were launched to focus the effort in getting for the underdeveloped, at least, the fulfillment of their “basic needs.” Meanwhile, the “law of scarcity” was construed by the economists to denote the technical assumption that man’s wants are huge and infinite, whereas his means are limited though improvable. Poverty and development thus go hand in hand. Indeed, historical experience reveals that development generates poverty. By 1985, the idea of post-development has already emerged.
Women as Objects and Commodities
Authors: Sajed Alina
Published: January 2018

The engagement between the discipline of international relations (IR) and feminist theory has led to an explosion of concerns about the inherent gendered dimension of a supposedly gender-blind field, and has given rise to a rich and complex array of analyses that attempt to capture the varied aspects of women’s invisibility, marginalization, and objectification within the discipline. The first feminist engagements within IR have pointed not only to the manner in which women are rendered invisible within the field, but also to IR’s inherent masculinity, which masks itself as a neutral and universally valid mode of investigation of world politics. Thus, the initial feminist incursions into IR’s discourse took the form of a conscious attempt both to bridge the gap between IR and feminist theory and to bring gender into IR, or, in other words, to make the field aware that “women are relevant to policy.” In the 1990s, feminist literature undertook incisive analyses of women’s objectification and commodification within the global economy. By the end of the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, the focus turned to an accounting for the agency of diverse women as they are located within complex sociopolitical contexts. The core concern of this inquiry lay with the diversification of feminist methodologies, especially as it related to the experience of women in non-Western societies.
Women's Leadership in International Politics
Authors: Domett Tania
Published: January 2018

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of women with leadership positions in national governments increased considerably. In 2006 alone, a woman became the head of government in Chile, South Korea, Liberia, and Jamaica. However, the question of how women differ from men in terms of leadership style and policy preferences has emerged as a subject of intense debate. Scholars have produced a substantial amount of work that addresses gender differences in political leadership, and particularly leadership in global politics. Many studies focus on women’s access to the upper echelons of political power, what women representatives bring to politics that is different, and how far and in what ways women politicians and legislators have different policy preferences to those of their male counterparts. More specifically, these studies explore whether women’s political representation helps advance women’s group interests. Within political science, there has been limited research regarding the systematic elements of leadership in politics, and especially the role that gender identity plays in the exercise of global political leadership. Future research should address these gaps, along with other questions such as what women leaders actually do with that power once they get there; whether women’s leadership indeed makes a difference for peace or for women’s group interests; and the political outcomes of women’s leadership.
World System History
Authors: Denemark Robert A.
Published: January 2018

World system history is a perspective on the global sociopolitical and economic system with a structural, long-term and transdisciplinary nature. The intellectual origins of the study of world system history can be characterized by three general trajectories, beginning with the work of global historians who have worked to write a “history of the world.” Attempts were also made by scholars such as Arnold Toynbee to write global history in terms of “civilizations”. A second pillar of world system history emerged from anthropology, when many historians of the ancient world, anthropologists, and archaeologists denied the importance of long-distance relations, especially those of trade. A third pillar emerged from the social sciences, including political science and sociology. One of the central ideas put forward was that sociopolitical and economic phenomena exhibited wave-like behavior. These various intellectual strands became self-consciously intertwined in the later 1980s and 1990s, when scholars from all of these traditions began to cross disciplinary boundaries and organize their own efforts under the rubric of world system history. This period saw Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills questioning the value of identifying a uniquely modern system based on a transition to capitalism that was said to have occurred in the West. Frank and Gills introduced the “continuity hypothesis,” which suggests that too much scholarly emphasis has been placed on the search for and elucidation of discontinuities and transitions. World system history faces two important challenges from determinism and indeterminacy, and future research should especially address the implications of the latter.
Capitalisms: A Global System
Authors: Deeg Richard
Published: January 2018

The global political economy is a multilevel system of economic activities and regulation in which the domestic level continues to predominate—in other words, it is a global system comprising national capitalist economies. Nations differ in terms of the regulations and institutions that govern economic activity, an observation that is embodied in the so-called “varieties of capitalism” (VoC) literature. Contemporary VoC approaches highlight the significance of social and political institutions in shaping national economies, in stark contrast to neoclassical economics which generally ignores institutions other than markets or sees them as hindrances to the functioning of free markets. Three analytical premises inform the diverse conceptual frameworks within the VoC literature: the firm-based approach, national business systems approach, and the governance or “social systems of production” approach. The VoC literature offers three important contributions to our understanding of the global political economy. The first is that different sources of competitive advantage for firms and nations are institutionally rooted and not easily changed. The second contribution is that these distinct national arrangements give rise to different interests/preferences in how the global economy is constructed and managed. Finally, the VoC approaches provide a framework for analyzing long-term institutional changes in capitalist systems and the persistence of diverse forms of capitalism, including the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 that may usher in yet another epochal change in the “battle of capitalisms.”
Caribbean Foreign Policy
Authors: Braveboy-Wagner Jacqueline Anne
Published: January 2018

Despite the near-absence of studies of the Caribbean within the mainstream of international relations (IR) theory and foreign policy analysis (FPA), as well as a tendency to subsume this diverse and unique region within the larger Latin America, a focus on Caribbean international relations offers several interesting implications for the wider fields of both IR and FPA. Realist, liberalist, constructivist, and critical approaches all can be incorporated into the study of Caribbean foreign policy in unique ways, and the subfield of foreign policy analysis can also be enriched by focusing on the particular domestic sources of foreign policy in small, culturally diverse, developing countries such as the Caribbean states. Among the unique characteristics of foreign policy in these states is the important role played by external forces in both the economy and the polity, leading to constraints on decision-making autonomy. The external factor also explains why the idea of “inter-American relations” has long been viewed as providing the necessary backdrop for explaining Caribbean foreign policy. Related to this is the important role played by the main regional actors, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), as well as the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which has thinned the boundary between state and region. As for the prioritization of military-security issues seen in the more powerful countries of the globe, these Caribbean states (apart from Cuba) have eschewed military adventures and traditionally defined their foreign policies in terms of the prioritization of economic development. Finally, to study Caribbean foreign policy means that the scholar must exercise creativity in borrowing from perspectives not normally included in traditional foreign policy studies. Sociology, anthropology, historiography, political economy, and public policy are complementary tools for understanding the Caribbean. Moreover, situating the study of foreign policy within general currents of thought on the role of small states and global south states is also recommended.
Democracy, Democratization, and Gender
Authors: Waylen Georgina
Published: January 2018

Democracies and the processes surrounding recent transitions to democracy are gendered in a variety of ways. Recently, feminist scholars have questioned the exclusionary ways in which democracy is both theorized and operationalized and how these have resulted in women and men being incorporated into democratic polities. They have demonstrated how processes of democratization, particularly the third wave of democratization that has taken place over the last three decades, are gendered. They have also shown that women’s movements were key actors in the broad opposition coalitions against many nondemocratic regimes. In order both to understand the differing role of organized women in the subsequent transitions to democracy and the ways in which transition paths affect gender outcomes, feminist scholars have begun to focus on the complex and sometimes contradictory interaction of four variables: the transition; women activists; political parties and politicians involved in the transition; and the institutional legacy of the nondemocratic regime. Two main areas that have been explored in relation to the political outcomes of transitions to democracy are women’s participation in competitive electoral politics and major changes in gender policy. In order to expand one important emerging area of research that is looking at how attempts to establish democracy in post-conflict settings are gendered, feminist scholars with expertise in third wave transitions to democracy need to analyze not only women’s roles in post-conflict institution building but also the ways that the outcomes have gendered implications more systematically.
Ethnoreligious Data Collection
Authors: Fox Jonathan
Published: January 2018

Collecting and examining datasets on ethnicity and religion involves translating and codifying real-world phenomena such as actions taken by governments and other groups into data which can be analyzed by social science statistical techniques. This methodology is intended to be applied to phenomena which in their original form are in a format not readily accessible to statistical analyses, i.e. “softer” phenomena and events such as government policies and conflict behavior. Thus, this methodology is not necessary for phenomena like GDP or government military spending, but is based on behavior by organizations or groups of individuals which are assessed by a coder who translates this behavior into data. Aggregate data collected by this methodology should have three qualities. First, they must be reproducible. Second, the data must be transparent in that all aspects of the data collection process and its products be clear and understandable to other researchers, to the extent that they could, in theory, be replicated. Third, it must measure what it intends to measure in a clear, accurate, and precise manner. A project which accomplishes all of this must be conceptualized properly from the beginning, including the decision on which unit of analysis to use and which cases to include and exclude. It must have appropriate sources and a tight variable design. Finally, the data must be collected in a systematic, transparent, and reproducible manner based upon appropriate sources.
Feminisms Troubling the Boundaries of International Relations
Authors: Sylvester Christine
Published: January 2018

A constant source of concern for feminists working in International Relations (IR) has been the field’s implied or stated boundaries. During the first ten years of its existence (roughly covering the years 1985–1995), the main goal of feminist IR was to challenge a caged-in knowledge realm that excluded more phenomena than it promised to seek. By the early twenty-first century, IR had devolved into a camp structure that was able to accommodate on the inside all manner of theories, people, and places. Yet while feminism contributed to troubled boundaries of IR, it did so against the backdrop of internal boundary dilemmas of inside and outside, good women/bad women, authentic versus dominant voice, gender versus feminism, and so on. Today, feminist IR is somewhat different from its earlier orientations. It now draws heavily on postmodern thinking about margins, multiple truths, subjugated identities and discourses, and power in general, and takes on IR theory and methodology using insights from postmodern thinking and other disciplines such as anthropology and geography. Feminist IR continues to bring new locations of the international and relations to the fore. Two such areas deal with the subject of violent women in international relations and the urgencies of development around the world.
Conflict Management
Authors: Mitchell Sara McLaughlin , Regan Patrick M.
Published: January 2018

The issue of armed conflict management was first mentioned in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1957, when Quincy Wright wrote that the resolution of international conflict can be facilitated by national government efforts “to prevent tensions for arising and aggravating disputes […] among nations. Such resolution can also proceed through the application of appropriate methods of negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement […] and the coordination of measures to prevent aggression.” However, there was remarkably little emphasis on studies of negotiation, mediation, or interstate bargaining before the mid-1970s. A more concerted focus on managing armed conflict began in the mid-1970s, and the 1990s and 2000s saw an explosion in the number of published quantitative studies on conflict management, driven in part by the significant growth in data collection projects on interstate conflict management. Over the past half-century, quantitative studies have identified the factors that promote the use and success of interstate conflict management. It should be noted that a lot of the usual suspect variables in the conflict literature, such as power parity, democracy, rivalry, and contiguity, appear in conflict management analyses as well. Yet the dialogue between these two literatures is often limited. On the other hand, conflict management courses typically organize themselves around the dependent variable, examining different forms of conflict management techniques (good offices, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, adjudication, etc.). Progress will be made on both fronts when we start thinking about these processes in a unified framework.
Gender, Women, and Representation in State Politics
Authors: Krook Mona Lena , Childs Sarah
Published: January 2018

The main contribution of research on women, gender, and state-level politics has been the introduction of the concept of gender and an expansion of traditional definitions of politics. These studies have continued to expand over the years, opening up some major areas of research as well as introducing challenges to feminist research on women, gender, and state-level politics. Social movements are among the key topics of recent studies. This is due to the fact that women have been largely excluded from other arenas of political participation. Work on political parties links to another major area of study. Although wide-ranging, it can be separated into research on electing versus being elected. Furthermore, women’s voting behavior and the election of female candidates are often treated as important questions in themselves. Another line of work, however, seeks to go beyond political priorities and presence to examine concrete policy outcomes. This research can be divided into three sets of questions: the behavior of female policy actors, the gendered nature of public policies, and the creation and evolution of gender equality policies. A fifth major literature points to the relationship between women, gender, and the state. The state is a central actor and topic in political science. Focusing on state-society interactions, feminists have been interested in understanding how states influence gender relations and, conversely, how gendered norms and practices shape state policies.
International Law and International Relations
Authors: Beck Robert J.
Published: January 2018

International Law (IL) is the set of rules generally regarded and accepted as binding in relations between states and between nations. It serves as a framework for the practice of stable and organized international relations (IR). International law differs from state-based legal systems in that it is primarily applicable to countries rather than to private citizens. National law may become international law when treaties delegate national jurisdiction to supranational tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights or the International Criminal Court. The immense body that makes up international law encompasses a piecemeal collection of international customs; agreements; treaties; accords, charters, legal precedents of the International Court of Justice (aka World Court); and more. Without a unique governing, enforcing entity, international law is a largely voluntary endeavor, wherein the power of enforcement only exists when the parties consent to adhere to and abide by an agreement. This is where IR come about; it attempts to explain behavior that occurs across the boundaries of states, the broader relationships of which such behavior is a part, and the institutions (private, state, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental) that oversee those interactions. Explanations can also be found in the relationships between and among the participants, in the intergovernmental arrangements among states, in the activities of multinational corporations, or in the distribution of power and control in the world as a single system.
Reciprocity in International Studies
Authors: Crescenzi Mark J. C. , Best Rebecca H. , Kwon Bo Ram
Published: January 2018

Reciprocity refers to the character of the actions and reactions between two or more actors. This character is commonly one of responding in kind to the actions of another. As such, reciprocity is considered one of the fundamental processes observed by scholars in the study of international relations (IR). In the realm of international politics, the study of reciprocity typically encompasses formal/experimental and empirical research. Some scholars look at ethical dimensions and the propagation of norms such as the Golden Rule, while others undertake empirical analysis of patterns of reciprocity in search of answers to questions about the existence, predictability, and diffusion of reciprocity. As a concept, reciprocity has applications in a range of IR topics such as the basic ingredients of cooperation, the escalation and return of conflict, and the adherence to international law. Within the realm of conflict processes, the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) and formal frameworks are often used to represent arms races and similar security concerns. Related to the iterated PD is the work of Robert Axelrod, who demonstrated the robustness of the reciprocal strategy known as tit-for-tat (TFT). One puzzle on reciprocity that deserves consideration in future research is that the expectation of a long time horizon for interaction should stimulate the incentive to cooperate, but long time horizons may also be associated with long pasts. One way to find the answer to this puzzle is to incorporate reciprocity into more general models of international interaction.