“Ukraine in the World: Studies in the International Relations and Security Structure of a Newly Independent State.” Special Issue, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Volume 20, 1996, 346 pp. + map and index.

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-706
Author(s):  
Nancy Popson
2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Gallagher

This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue and an ability to enable progress or improvement. Norms become ideal when they are able to conflate what is good with what is appropriate, standard, or proper. It is when the good becomes ‘natural’ that a norm appears immanent and non-contestable, and so acquires an idealized form.45Along with the other articles in this special issue, I will attempt to challenge some of the complacency surrounding the apparent naturalness and universality of norms employed in international relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-670
Author(s):  
John Watkins

Scholars of contemporary international relations have long noted the rise of such nonstate agents as global corporations and NGOs on the world stage. With that shift in mind, John Robert Kelley has questioned the continued viability of an institutional definition of diplomacy that dates back to the eighteenth century. If corporate directors and NGO officers have as much impact in shaping international systems as traditionally commissioned diplomats, it might make more sense to redefine diplomacy as a behavior that can be carried out by nonstate, noncommissioned agents. As the essays gathered in this special issue suggest, that behavioralist redefinition of diplomacy might apply just as well to the premodern state system, before the rise of the familiar foreign office, as to the postmodern state system, whose multilayered complexities extend, resist, and often successfully counter the policy goals of traditional diplomats. Diplomats mattered in premodern state relations. But so did merchants and missionaries, writers, actors, and other artists.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff

This article addresses the themes animating the Special Issue from the other side of the coin, namely the notion of aestheticizing political pedagogies. This reflects the direction of travel in some sections of politics and international relations scholarship, where there has been an upsurge of interest in aesthetics and especially popular culture. While there have been valuable contributions on teaching within such work, there has been a lack of sustained reflection on how, for example, a more aesthetically informed pedagogical practice can help us encourage students to think critically in creative ways. There has also been a rather bloodless account of aesthetics, diverting attention away from its visceral essence. Taking inspiration from the writings of Matt Davies on aesthetics, Jennifer Mason on the sensory and Cynthia Enloe on curiosity and surprise, the article explores the potential for aestheticizing political pedagogies to be mobilized in purposeful, strategic ways for enhancing the capacity of students to think critically and creatively. More specifically, I discuss how sensorily-oriented modes of teaching can disrupt entanglements between students’ ways of knowing and experiencing the world and their ‘objective’ understandings of politics, society, culture and so on. Three examples from my own teaching practice are discussed, all rooted in my utilization of extreme metal music with the aim of cultivating curiosity among students about their topics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia U. Rutazibwa

This review essay is a generative reading of four monographs and one special issue to rethink the discipline of International Relations (IR) and its syllabus anticolonially. At the centre of White Innocence by Gloria Wekker, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe, The Colonial Lives of Property by Brenna Bhandar, Beyond Coloniality by Aaron Kamugisha and the New Political Economy special issue titled Raced Markets edited by Robbie Shilliam and Lisa Tilley are issues of race and racism, neoliberalism and capital and (the afterlives of) colonisation and slavery. This essay deploys a narrative approach of the autobiographical example to write the themes and arguments of the works onto the international everyday, i.c. a period of five months (April-September 2019) and the five places (Toronto, Stellenbosch, (New) England, Ghana and Puerto Rico) in which these works were read. First, the themes of racism, capitalism and coloniality – to varying degrees disavowed and erased in both IR as a discipline and public opinion – appear as persistent, pervasive yet adapting across time, space and situatedness. Second, both the autobiographical examples and the works point at the equally omnipresent cracks in the system and invite reflection on anticolonial alternatives (of solidarity). In conclusion, the essay explores how these works could inform reconceptualisation of the IR syllabus, towards a discipline that engages with the world rather than itself, against the colonial status quo.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Brown

The editors of the special issue, in their call for papers for this special issue, expressed a degree of disquiet at the current state of International Relations theory, but the situation is both better and worse than they suggest. On the one hand, in some areas of the discipline, there has been real progress over the last decade. The producers of liberal and realist International Relations theory may not have the kind of standing in the social/human sciences as the ‘Grand Theorists’ identified by Quentin Skinner in his seminal mid-1980s’ collection, but they have a great deal to say about how the world works, and the world would have been a better place over the last decade or so if more notice had been taken of what they did say. On the other hand, the range of late modern theorists who brought some of Skinner’s Grand Theorists into the reckoning in the 1980s have, in the main, failed to deliver on the promises made in that decade. The state of International Relations theory in this neck of the woods is indeed a cause for concern; there is a pressing need for ‘critical problem-solving’ theory, that is, theory that relates directly to real-world problems but approaches them from the perspective of the underdog.


Author(s):  
Shaun Breslin ◽  
Pan Zhongqi

Have China’s international relations changed fundamentally under Xi Jinping? Or is it rather a matter of heading in the same direction as before, but with a considerable increase in pace accompanied by a greater confidence in outlining where this journey is taking China (and as a consequence, the world as well)? This introduction outlines some of the collective conclusions of the special issue as a whole, and in explaining the rationale for constructing it, pays tribute to John Peterson’s contribution and support.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff D Colgan

AbstractScholars of international relations (IR) from the United States, like any country, view the world with particular perspectives and beliefs that shape their perceptions, judgments, and worldviews. These perspectives have the potential to affect the answers to a host of important questions—in part by shaping the questions that get asked in the first place. All scholars are potentially affected by national bias, but American bias matters more than others. This special issue focuses on two issues: attention and accuracy in IR research. While previous scholarship has raised principally normative or theoretical concerns about American dominance in IR, our work is heavily empirical and engages directly with the field's mainstream neopositivist approach. The collected articles provide specific, fine-grained examples of how American perspectives matter for IR, using evidence from survey experiments, quantitative datasets, and more. Our evidence suggests that American perspectives, left unexamined, negatively affect our field's research. Still, the essays in this special issue remain bullish about the field's neopositivist project overall. We also offer concrete steps for taking on the problems we identify, and improving our field's scholarship.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Stavrianakis ◽  
Maria Stern

While attention to security has grown exponentially over the last few decades, militarism – the preparation for and normalization and legitimation of war – has not received the widespread and sustained focus it warrants in mainstream or critical circles. Rather than stake a claim for one concept over the other, however, this article – and the special issue to which it serves as an introduction – asks how we are to understand the relationship between security and militarism, both as analytical tools and as objects of analysis. We examine, first, what analytical and political work militarism and security do as concepts, and how they can be mobilized methodologically; second, what the possibilities are of fruitful exchange between knowledges produced about these concepts or practices; and, third, what the limits are of militarism and security. In the process, we address the shifts in the world that international relations and its related subfields study; shifts in the institutional framing and materiality of fields and subfields of research; and shifts in how international relations studies the world. Read together, the contributions to the special issue make the case for a reinvigorated focus on the mutual co-constitution of militarism and security.


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