Suchergebnisse

The policy brief is an innovative and underutilised form of teaching, learning and assessment which provides undergraduate students with practical skills that translate directly into the workplace. This alternative to standard essays also challenges students to expand their research, writing and presentation skills. Further pedagogical advantages include assisting students in building personal development portfolios, improving internship programmes and making it difficult to plagiarise. International relations and political science curricula in the UK would benefit from the wider use of this tool.

For some time, the growing stature of political science as an independent social science has been a notable feature in American universities. Yet, up to the present time, the categories of this new field of scientific endeavor have not found their way into the indexing departments of libraries, nor have they been recognized by indexers of other collections. Even the editors of encyclopedias, people of great learning and ability, have omitted some of the most significant topics of political science, because of the lack of any accepted index indicating the range of the field and focusing attention upon its primary categories. The American Political Science Review itself is confronted with the problem of a suitable subject-index. The growing complexity of all kinds of materials bearing upon the work of political scientists, and more particularly the increasing mass of public documents, has become more and more baffling. Even the skillful indexers of the Congressional Record, for example, seem unaware of the major topics of interest for political science, and thus no sign-posts of the usual kind have been made available to workers in our field.

Discusses moral principles, duties, obligations, and rights for political communities, focusing on ethical foreign policy, "no harm" principle as one way to reconcile duties, insider/outsider rights, and citizenship issues.

"What is international relations (IR) theory? Is it an arcane academic enterprise or relevant to the real world? What do we mean by theory? What kinds of knowledge do theories seek or represent? How do they stipulate it should be found? How should we evaluate any resulting knowledge claims? What do answers to these questions tell us about the theory project in IR, and more generally in the social sciences? I address all of these questions in this book and set of companion videos. The videos can be accessed free of charge at nedlebow.com I cover epistemological ground with which you may be familiar, but perhaps not. I lay bare and query the assumptions of positivist and interpretivist approaches to knowledge in general and to IR in particular. I identify and explore the most important inner tensions of these epistemologies and question the assumptions they make about the world. I identify problems that need to be addressed, suggest some possible strategies or reformulations toward this end, and how adherents of the two epistemologies might learn from one other. Above all, I am interested in the extent to which IR theories can tell us something useful about the world. This book is as about theory in IR, not about theories of IR. This distinction is an important one. It focuses on theory, what it is, purports to be, and how it organizes our understanding of the discipline and the world. It engages some IR theories and research programs, but only as illustrations or for the insights they offer into the questions I have posed. It differs significantly from most other books on IR theory"--

The relationship between political theory, including the history of political thought, and International Relations theory, including the history of international thought, has been, and to some extent remains, complex and troubled. On both sides of the Atlantic, the mid-twentieth century founders of International Relations as an academic discipline drew extensively on the canon of political thought, but approached the subject in an uncritical way, while political philosophers largely disdained the international as a focus. This changed in the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of the 'justice industry' based on critiques of Rawls' A Theory of Justice and a consequent recovering of the past history of cosmopolitan and communitarian thought. A new discourse emerged in this period – International Political Theory – bridging the gap between political thought and international relations and stimulating a far more creative and scholarly approach to the history of international thought. However, in a social science environment dominated by the methods of economics, that is, formal theory and quantification, the new discourse of International Political Theory occupies a niche rather than existing at the centre of the discipline.