Search results

This article examines the humanitarian approach to nuclear weapons, which has reinvigorated the efforts to achieve their prohibition. It explores the fundamental arguments made by the 'Humanitarian Initiative' and their grounding in a relationship between international law and international politics. The analysis draws on the emphasis that classical realists put on the political nature of international problems, primarily shaped by considerations of power. Such approach is useful because the humanitarian approach attempts to address the political problem of nuclear weapons by recourse to claims about morality and through the means of international law, most notably the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, deliberately choosing to circumvent politics and its concern with power. The classical realist perspective suggests that to overlook the power political dimension and to consider the problem of nuclear weapons chiefly as a moral and legal issue is likely to lead to yet another failure in efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament.

This introduction to this Special Issue of International Relations dedicated to Karl Deutsch makes the case that his scholarship was transformative in more ways than is typically recognized in the discipline. Besides being a theoretical and methodological innovator, Deutsch also envisaged that research must have transformative qualities for the future of human relations. The latter in particular deserves attention of International Relations (IR) students because it opens up possibilities for novel empirical and theoretical research of international politics. Deutsch clearly believed that social scientific research must be normatively grounded and serve normative purposes.

This article begins by asking why Karl Deutsch never directly intervened in what has come to be known in the field as the second debate. This point of departure is used to outline Deutsch's views on the purpose of knowledge. It is apparent that Deutsch was unwilling to make the distinction between the traditional and scientific approaches, which stood at the heart of the debate started by Hedley Bull. Deutsch's position tried to embrace both approaches, because they were necessary in order to answer the big and important questions he asked. Deutsch also rejected the notion that the scientific approach could be devoid of normative concerns. Finally, the article argues that Deutsch keenly adopted methods connected with the scientific approach because he believed they made it possible to spot new patterns which might hold novel answers to the profoundly normative question of humankind's survival.

This article presents the idea that the social sciences are by nature normative & so simply cannot exist without normativeness at all. Their purpose is to understand & help solve social problems. The choices of issues, problems & questions are neither random nor objective, but are the results of normative consensus of their specific social-scientific discipline, as well as the greater social environment in which social scientists make them. This argument is applied to the polemics between Marek Louzek & Petr Drulak. I show that contrary to Louzek's assertions, the realism of E. H. Carr & Hans Morgenthau is strongly & explicitly normatively oriented. It is therefore unjustified to distinguish between normative idealists & scientific realists. The final section deals with the question what this conclusion means for the study of international relations. Adapted from the source document.

For more than four decades the twin goals of nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament have been an almost unchallenged objective of the "international community." Like drought prevention, or bans on the use of child soldiers, nonproliferation remains a mostly uncontroversial, largely universalistic initiative to which few object. The proponents of nonproliferation are fond of stressing that the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has more signatories than any other arms control treaty. Who would not want to prevent more states from obtaining nuclear weapons? And who, for that matter, would oppose the ideal of a world free of such weapons?