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Angell versus Mahan: revisiting International Relations on the eve of World War I International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Seán Molloy
In 1912 a debate erupted between Alfred Thayer Mahan and Norman Angell. The debate revolved around what motivates states and what constitutes the fundamental bases of human conduct in relation to war, peace and material interests. The article traces the thrusts and counter thrusts of Angell and Mahan as they lay bare the errors and misconceptions of each other in a heated exchange that marked an important
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Oil, materiality and International Relations International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Roland Dannreuther
Oil is a major topic in International Relations (IR). However, the discipline has tended to focus primarily on the effects and impacts of oil, particularly in relation to conflict, war and empire, and on the international political economy of oil, such as the role of the large oil companies and the oil-rich producer states. This article offers a more holistic approach by adopting a new materialisms
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Saudi Arabia’s costly war in Yemen: a neoclassical realist theory of overbalancing International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Thomas Juneau
Saudi Arabia faced multiple threats from Yemen in 2015: its southern neighbor had collapsed; a hostile sub-state actor, the Houthis, was entrenching itself along the border; and the presence of its rival Iran was growing. Responding was rational; it would have been sub-optimal for Riyadh to underbalance by doing little to counter the threat. Instead, however, Saudi Arabia overbalanced by launching
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A gendered analysis of US decline: a cautionary tale International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Clara Eroukhmanoff
This article offers an innovative gendered analysis of the thesis of US decline, a prominent theory shared amongst International Relations scholars and US foreign policy experts about the impending end of US hegemony and the US-led international order. Inspired by feminist International Relations, it demonstrates that masculinism underscores the theory in three important ways: the methodologies used
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When contestation legitimizes: the norm of climate change action and the US contesting the Paris Agreement International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Laura von Allwörden
In 2017 US president Trump announced the intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This was widely perceived as a major challenge to continued cooperation to counter climate change. A feared consequence was further member withdrawal leading to the weakening of the Paris agreement and thus, the climate change action norm. Yet instead, states and non-state actors recommitted to the agreement and further
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The post-hegemonic turn in humanitarian intervention: regional ownership and troubled great power management International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Peter Viggo Jakobsen, Tonny Brems Knudsen
Since the Great Recession in 2008, the academic debate has been flooded with literature that predicts the sunset of the liberal world order including the practice of humanitarian intervention as initiated at the United Nations (UN) in the early 1990s and regulated by the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005. In contrast, this article argues that the practice of humanitarian intervention
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The international cooperation of the populist radical right: building counter-hegemony in international relations International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2024-01-13 Thorsten Wojczewski
This article analyses the international cooperation of the radical right and the role of populism in forging cross-border ties between different political projects. Drawing on the Laclauian-Mouffian poststructuralist discourse theory, it conceptualises this cross-border collaboration as an attempt to build an international counter-hegemonic project and sheds light on its discursive formation and content
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Invitation games and the politics of joining US-led coalition warfare: a small state perspective International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Rasmus Pedersen, Yf Reykers
How do status-seeking governments in small states mobilize parliamentary support for participation in US-led warfare coalitions? We argue that the formulation of official invitations by the United ...
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Is someone’s mercenary another’s contractor? American, British, and Russian private security companies in US and UK parliamentary debates International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-03-25 Matteo C M Casiraghi, Eugenio Cusumano
Scholars disagree on whether an anti-mercenary norm exists, whether today’s private military and security companies (PMSCs) fall under its scope, and whether the privatization of security erode par...
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Strength born of weakness: the advantages of open maritime polities in multipolar international systems International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Mihai Murariu, George Anglitoiu
This paper focuses on open maritime polities and their competitive advantages in multipolar international systems. Firstly, the paper explores the various understandings of seapower and its possibl...
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Trumpism and the rejection of global climate governance International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Aaron Ettinger, Andrea M Collins
This paper explains the ideational foundations of Donald Trump’s rejection of global climate cooperation and its implications for the future of global climate governance. We argue that Trumpism’s a...
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Beyond hegemony, world order as domination: Iran’s Green Movement and the nuclear sanctions regimes International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Shabnam J Holliday
Contributing to neo-Gramscian IR and debates regarding world order, this article puts forward Gramsci’s domination as a framework for better understanding the dynamics of a so-called ‘western liber...
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The purpose of military force and the Obama doctrine: no fighting for face International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Payam Ghalehdar
The scholarly debate about the Obama doctrine has focused on the extent of military force in Obama’s foreign policy. Offering both a novel definition of presidential doctrines and a reinterpretatio...
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Parliamentarizing war: explaining legislative votes on Canadian military deployments International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Philippe Lagassé, Justin Massie
The parliamentarization of military deployments is a burgeoning area of study but has tended to neglect the peculiar cases of legislatures deprived of any war powers. This article contributes to th...
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Anxiety, humour and (geo)politics: warfare by other memes International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Christopher S Browning, James Brassett
Humour is usually overlooked in analyses of international politics, this despite its growing prevalence and circulation in an increasingly mediatised world, with this neglect also evident in the gr...
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Covid-19: crisis, emotional governance and populist fantasy narratives International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Catarina Kinnvall
This short article discusses how different fantasy narratives have come together during the Covid-19 crisis in various far-right movements, parties and audiences across the world and how much of th...
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COVID-19: uncertainty in a mood of anxiety International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Bahar Rumelili
This contribution to the Forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19, develops a conception of uncertainty as constituted by cognitive (awareness of possibilities) and affective ...
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Anxiety and political action in times of the Covid-19 pandemic International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Andreja Zevnik
Since the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 countries across the world have implemented various measures to contain the virus. They have restricted public gatherings, ...
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Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19 International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Bahar Rumelili
This is the introduction to the forum, Anxiety and possibility: the many future(s) of COVID-19. It summarizes the contributions within a common framework and situates them in the extant literature.
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No such thing as a free donation? Research funding and conflicts of interest in nuclear weapons policy analysis International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Kjølv Egeland, Benoît Pelopidas
Numerous scholars have in recent years concluded that the field of nuclear weapons policy analysis is plagued by widespread self-censorship, conformism, and enduring disconnects between accepted kn...
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Chasing gender equality norms: the robustness of sexual and reproductive health and rights International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Esther Barbé, Diego Badell
This article studies Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) at the United Nations (UN). SRHR, a gender equality norm that applies human rights to sexuality and reproduction, have traditio...
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Twinning for solidarity: building affective communities in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan Revolution International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Holly Eva Ryan
In the British popular imagination, ‘twinning’ is perhaps most commonly associated with mayoral delegations, civic ceremonies and the post-war peacebuilding project in Europe. However, the model an...
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Conflict and Covid-19: exploring the effects on women International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Outi Donovan
What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee cam...
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Realism, reckless states, and natural selection International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-04 Matthew Rendall
Why is daredevil aggression like Russia’s war on Ukraine such an important factor in world politics? Neither offensive nor defensive realists give a fully satisfactory answer. This paper maintains ...
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Mission saves us all: Great Russia and Global Britain dealing with ontological insecurity International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Alicja Curanović, Piotr Szymański
In this paper we analyse a situation wherein the political establishments of Russia and the United Kingdom, in the face of ontological insecurity, use narratives with messianic overtones in their f...
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The limits of US national identity: interests and values in US military aid International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Evan W Sandlin
According to policymakers, US national values shape US foreign aid policy. However, these national values clash with material interests when policymakers are faced with the decision of whether or n...
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State of nature versus states as firms: reassessing the Waltzian analogy of structural realism International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-11-26 Zhichao Tong
This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics: the analogy he makes between firms and states. Specifically, I contrast this ‘states as firms’ a...
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The Chagos Islands and international orders: human rights, rule of law, and foreign rule International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-11-05 Martin Welz
This article uses the Chagos Archipelago that is administered by the United Kingdom, used as a military base by the US, and claimed by Mauritius, as a case study to explore competing international ...
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The liturgy of triumph: victory culture, popular rituals, and the US way of wartiming International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Andrew R Hom, Luke Campbell
Wartime is fundamentally important to the study of international politics but not especially well understood. In this paper, we use timing theory and the concept of liturgy to unpack the contempora...
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‘We watched his whole life unfold. . .Then you watch the death’: drone tactics, operator trauma, and hidden human costs of contemporary wartime International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Terilyn Johnston Huntington, Amy E Eckert
Scholars of war and combat posit that soldiers are more willing to execute strikes on adversaries when they perceive lower risk to themselves or less connection with their targets. Accordingly, tec...
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Afterword: war:time International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Lisa Ellen Silvestri
How should we think about war today? This afterword assesses the impact of using a temporal lens to understand contemporary conflict. Reflecting upon my own work on media and war alongside wider so...
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Wartime in the 21st century International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Andrew R Hom, Luke Campbell
Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems, and re...
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Home and the world: the legal imagination of Martti Koskenniemi International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 David Armitage
The Finnish lawyer-historian Martti Koskenniemi’s new book, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1870 (2021), is the culmination of a 30-year-long pr...
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From subjects to objects: honor flights and US ontological insecurity International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Brent J Steele
Following the 2004 establishment of the World War II memorial in Washington DC, itself a product of the collective re-commemoration of the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ of WWII veterans in the US...
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The world is upside down: seeing IR from below International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-13 J. Ann Tickner
This review essay engages three texts focused on women who engaged with international thought in the early to mid-20th century. Women’s International Thought: A New History and Women’s Internationa...
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The Liberal International Ordering of crisis International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-07 Columba Peoples
This article analyses and critically reflects on how the concept of ‘crisis’ has tended to feature within prominent debates on ‘Crisis of the Liberal International Order’. Within such scholarship, ...
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A ‘continuing, imminent’ threat: the temporal frameworks enabling the US war on terrorism International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Christopher McIntosh
For nearly two decades, the United States has chosen to narrate its response to terrorism through what Judith Butler refers to as the ‘frame of war’. Despite this, victory in that country’s longest...
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A contestation of nuclear ontologies: resisting nuclearism and reimagining the politics of nuclear disarmament International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Nick Ritchie
The global politics of nuclear disarmament has become deeply contested over the past decade, particularly around the negotiation of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Dif...
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Wartime, professional military education, and politics International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Kathryn Marie Fisher
The 2018 United States (US) National Military Strategy claimed that professional military education (PME) in the US had ‘stagnated’. Since then the 2020 US Joint Chiefs of Staff publication Develop...
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Fashion’s diplomatic role: an instrument of French prestige-based commercial diplomacy, 1960s–1970s International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Vincent Dubé-Senécal
This article re-examines the aid-to-couture plans enacted by France at the end of the 1960s from both historical and diplomatic perspectives. In so doing, it assesses the decision-making process of...
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At war or saving lives? On the securitizing semantic repertoires of Covid-19 International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-09-23 Stephane J Baele, Elise Rousseau
This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This assessmen...
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Western populism and liberal order: a reflection on ‘structural liberalism’ and the resilience of Western liberal order International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-09-21 Johnson Singh Chandam
The rise of populism in Western democracies creates presumed threats on liberal international order. Although a number of scholarly works are dedicated to the populist challenge on liberal democrac...
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Counterinsurgency in (un)changing times? Colonialism, hearts and minds, and the war on terror International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 deRaismes Combes
Counterinsurgencies mostly fail, as the 2021 allied withdrawal from Afghanistan illustrates. Still, confronting insurgencies remains a central component in ongoing counterterror efforts around the ...
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Selective humanitarians: how region and conflict perception drive military interventions in intrastate crises International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Sidita Kushi
Why are some violent intrastate crises more likely to prompt humanitarian military interventions than others? States appear to intervene robustly in reaction to some internal conflicts, such as Kos...
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International/inter-carbonic relations International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Jan Selby
If international relations can be theorised as ‘inter-textual’, then why not also – or indeed better – as ‘inter-carbonic’? For, not only is the modern history of carbon to a large degree internati...
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Fitting national interests with populist opportunities: intervention politics on the European radical right International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-07-22 Toby Greene
As European radical right parties grow in influence, and as foreign and security policy becomes more politicised, these parties have increasing potential to shape national debates on international ...
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King in the North: evaluating the status recognition and performance of the Scandinavian countries International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Pål Røren, Anders Wivel
The Scandinavian states’ pursuit of status in world politics is well documented. However, little is known about whether these endeavors have resulted in higher status for these states. In this arti...
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Saving capitalism from empire: uses of colonial history in new institutional economics International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Onur Ulas Ince
This article contributes to theorising colonialism and capitalism within the same analytic frame through a critical engagement with the uses of colonial history in new institutional economics (NIE)...
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Strategic culture and competing visions for the EU’s Russia strategy: flexible accommodation, cooperative deterrence, and calibrated confrontation International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Paul Silva, II
This article analyzes the national security strategies of EU member states in the 2009–2018 period, and conceptualizes three security strategies EU member states have adopted toward Russia – flexible accommodation, cooperative deterrence, and calibrated confrontation. It tests strategic culture hypotheses against those of realism and commercial liberalism to explain the variation of EU member states’
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Violence re-directed: due care and the moral challenge of casualty displacement warfare International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Neil C Renic, Sebastian Kaempf
In this article, we argue in favour of a conceptual expansion of the Just War idea of ‘due care’, to include the foreseeable, but indirect harm generated by Western force protection. This harm includes the phenomenon of ‘casualty displacement warfare’ – circumstances in which the prioritisation and relative success of Western force protection incentivises some Western adversaries to redirect more of
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Globalising the ‘war on terror’? An analysis of 36 countries International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-06-16 Tobias Ide
The war on terror as a discourse assumes that terrorism is an essential threat of global proportions, is mostly perpetuated by Islamist networks, and requires a strong international response. This discourse had tremendous impacts on both domestic and international politics. Consequentially, a large number of studies analyse the assumptions underlying and the policies legitimised by the war on terror
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‘UNESCO’s World Heritage List: power, national interest, and expertise’ International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-06-16 Deborah Barros Leal Farias
With almost universal membership, the World Heritage Convention is at the heart of the global governance of heritage. Nested within UNESCO, the Convention sets the parameters for determining which natural and/or cultural sites can receive the prestigious ‘World Heritage Property’ designation and be added to the World Heritage List. What started in the early 1970s as an expert-based classification procedure
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Imagined communities: from subjecthood to nationality in the British Atlantic International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Luke Cooper
Drawing on the concept of uneven and combined development this article critically interrogates Benedict Anderson’s theory of the ‘imagined community’ through an historical investigation into the English-realm-cum-British-empire. Placing its rise in the context of the conflicts of Post-Reformation Europe, it identifies vectors of combined development (money, goods, ideas, people) which shaped the formation
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Pluralism, plurality and interdisciplinary relations in IR: shifting theoretical directions International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Hiroaki Ataka
Despite concerns over the discipline’s state of ‘fragmentation’, there is no systematic empirical analysis of how this theoretical proliferation is driven by ‘importing’ from other fields. This paper attempts to fill this gap by analysing data collected from American, European, British and Japanese journals during 2011–2015. It argues that interdisciplinary relations are not only fuelling theoretical
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The international system and the Syrian civil war International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Christopher Phillips
How does the international system impact a civil war? Does polarity affect the war’s outbreak, character and how long it lasts? Systemic Realists argue multipolarity makes inter-state war more likely, but is this also true of intra-state war? Using the Syria conflict (2011-present) as a case study, this article suggests a connection can be found. It argues that the end of US-dominated unipolarity,
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Disentangling populism and nationalism as discourses of foreign policy: the case of Greek foreign policy during the Eurozone crisis 2010-19 International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Angelos Chryssogelos
Populism and nationalism are often grouped together as phenomena challenging international cooperation. This article argues that, despite these similarities, international relations and foreign policy scholarship can and should distinguish analytically between them. Populism and nationalism differ in how they visualise and articulate the boundaries of the political community and its relationship with
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Review essay: the nuclear curse International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Richard Ned Lebow
The five books under review address nuclear weapons and the risk of war during the Cold War. Four of the five contend this risk was higher than understood by policymakers at the time or many scholars in its aftermath. They attribute this risk to strategic alerts, close encounters of opposing forces in crisis, and lack of access to critical intelligence. They consider the superpowers to have emerged
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‘Acting under Chapter 7’: rhetorical entrapment, rhetorical hollowing, and the authorization of force in the UN security council, 1995–2017 International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Johannes Scherzinger
After more than 25 years of scholarship, the deliberative turn in international relations (IR) theory is ready to be revisited with a fresh perspective. Using new methods from automated text analyses, this explorative article investigates how rhetoric may bind action. It does so by building upon Schimmelfennig’s original account of rhetorical entrapment. To begin, I theorize the opposite of entrapment
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Dealing with guilt and shame in international politics International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Gadi Heimann
State and non-state actors often try to provoke moral emotions like guilt and shame to mobilize political change. However, tactics such as `naming and shaming’ are often ineffective, suggesting that policy makers engage in norm violations in ways that minimize moral emotions. We argue that when violating norms, decision makers deal with guilt and shame through coping mechanisms that allow them to pursue
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Role conflict in International Relations: the case of Indonesia’s regional and global engagements International Relations (IF 2.073) Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Moch Faisal Karim
In recent years, scholars have devoted increased attention to the notion of roles in foreign policy analysis and international relations. However, role theory literature has so far less frequently explored re-conceptualising role conflict. To further understand the concept of role conflict, this article aims to unpacks the notion of international audiences. To do so, this article advances the application