American Perspectives and Blind Spots on World Politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff D Colgan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
The World ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Blind Spots

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.

Things You Can See From There You Can't See From Here: Blind Spots in the American Perspective in IR and Their Effects

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dov H Levin ◽  
Robert F Trager
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intergovernmental Organizations ◽  
Important Research ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Blind Spots

AbstractHow do the limitations of the American perspective in international relations (IR) affect the accuracy of theorizing? We show that assumptions about the relationship between domestic and international politics that underlie significant segments of American IR scholarship are unwarranted. Publics around the world do not respond to United Nations’ and other intergovernmental organizations’ criticism of their governments in the same way that Americans do. Publics are not universally poorly informed of their country's foreign policies, and they are not equally skeptical of the value of using force for resolving disputes with other states. We demonstrate the limitations of US-based scholarship using new and unique survey data from the United States and other countries. We then address how these US-centric assumptions skew certain IR literatures and limit important research agendas pursued by American scholars.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue: Soft Power of Civil Society in International Relations

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-476
Author(s):  
TAKASHI INOGUCHI
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Policy Makers

This special issue focuses on the role of civil society in international relations. It highlights the dynamics and impacts of public opinion on international relations (Zaller, 1992). Until recently, it was usual to consider public opinion in terms of its influence on policy makers and in terms of moulding public opinion in the broad frame of the policy makers in one's country. Given that public opinion in the United States was assessed and judged so frequently and diffused so globally, it was natural to frame questions guided by those concepts which pertained to the global and domestic context of the United States.

scholarly journals O Debate Contemporâneo Sobre o Princípio de Soberania na Literatura Ocidental de Relações Internacionais l The Contemporary Debate on the Principle of Sovereignty in the Western Literature of International Relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. e58704
Author(s):  
Alice Castelani de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Contemporary Context

A soberania representa uma das articulações políticas mais importantes da Modernidade, a qual convencionou a separação entre as políticas interna e externa. Posto isso, entendemos que para compreender o mundo em que vivemos é necessário pensar essa categoria à luz do contexto contemporâneo, então, com o objetivo de contribuir para o estudo desse conceito, no presente artigo apresentaremos uma revisão do debate atual sobre a categoria de soberania. Para esse fim, nos apoiaremos em um exame da literatura ocidental de Relações Internacionais (RI), com foco em autores americanos, considerando que a produção de conhecimento dos Estados Unidos (EUA) é preponderante dentro deste campo. Esclarecemos que o debate na esfera destacada pode ser dividido em duas linhas de pesquisa que serão exploradas neste texto. A primeira aborda o aprofundamento da globalização e os efeitos desse processo sobre soberania e a segunda discute como são socialmente construídos os discursos sobre essa categoria.Palavras-Chave: Teoria; Relações Internacionais; Soberania.ABSTRACTSovereignty represents one of the most important political articulations of Modernity, which established the separation between internal and external policies. That said, we understand that in order to understand the world in which we live, it is necessary to think about this category in the light of the contemporary context, so, in order to contribute to the study of this concept, in this article we’ll present a review of the current debate on the category of sovereignty. To that end, we’ll rely on an examination of the Western International Relations (IR) literature, focusing on American authors, considering that the production of knowledge from the United States (USA) is predominant within this field. We clarify that the debate in the highlighted sphere can be divided into two lines of research that will be explored in this text. The first addresses the deepening of globalization and the effects of this process on sovereignty and the second discusses how the speeches about this category are socially constructed.Keywords: Theory; International Relations; Sovereignty. Recebido em: 27/03/2021 | Aceito em: 18/05/2021. 

International approaches to school-based mental health: Intent of the Special Issue

2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney L. McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Health It ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
School Based ◽  
The World

This article provides an overview of the special issue on international approaches to school-based mental health. It introduces the significance of the issues associated with mental health across the world and introduces the reader to the four articles highlighting different aspects of school-based mental health. Across these four articles, information about school-based mental health (SBMH) from the United States, Canada, Norway, Liberia, Chile, and Ireland are represented. The special issue concludes with an article introducing new methodology for examining mental health from a global perspective.

How geopolitical becomes personal: Method acting, war films and affect

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Evren Eken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
War Films ◽  
Method Acting ◽  
Performance Arts ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Emotional Level

This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the embodiment of screen actors. While International Relations is attempting to move beyond the limits of existing disciplinary methods and methodologies to better grasp the emotional depths of world politics, this article delves into the ‘method’ in performance arts to understand how visual culture diffuses emotional narratives of the state to the population and affectively enables people to experience the international from the perspective of the United States. In this sense, focusing on ‘method acting’ which revolutionised performance arts in the United States from the 1950s, the article examines the mundane encounters in visual culture through which screen/state actors emotionally situate the audience to make them viscerally experience geopolitics, personally feel like a state/warrior and embody a commitment to the war effort at an emotional level.

The Language of Security in Philippine-us Relations

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-146
Author(s):  
Charmaine G. Misalucha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Language Games ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Way

Abstract There is a need to reformulate the way in which we view international relations. Rather than simply a play at an obscure theater with the same characters reprising their respective roles based on an old script, international relations need to be seen as a play at the world stage whose script is always being reviewed, revised, rewritten, and renegotiated by characters who are actively searching for ways to be accommodated. In this way, the characters and the roles they play are provisional: they become who or what they are because of actions they take, and not necessarily because they are fated to be revered or condemned. To achieve the fluid nature of this script, one must pay attention to language games. These games allow for the participation of both sides of the equation – the Philippines and the United States – in the creation of the structure and direction of their relationship.

Thucydides and hegemony: Athens and the United States

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ned Lebow ◽  
Robert Kelly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Peloponnesian War ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The World

Fifth century Greeks distinguished between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control). Thucydides employed this distinction to track the changing nature of the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogue—often cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policy—is intended to symbolize this decay. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally.

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