Suchergebnisse

Given its economic success and the political transformations of the last decade, it is not surprising that Turkey is now charting an ambitious course in foreign policy. This article provides a sober assessment of some of the shortcomings becoming evident in Turkish foreign policy, and argues that if these problems are not addressed, Turkey is due to fall short of its regional leadership ambitions.

Given its economic success and the political transformations of the last decade, it is not surprising that Turkey is now charting an ambitious course in foreign policy. This article provides a sober assessment of some of the shortcomings becoming evident in Turkish foreign policy, and argues that if these problems are not addressed, Turkey is due to fall short of its regional leadership ambitions. (Nationalities Papers)

AbstractThis article aims to understand the phenomenon of international terrorism by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the modern international system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a 'terrorist' cause is based on and how threatening we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be. All historical variants of modern 'terrorism' fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity. They are either based in claims to local authority and target only particular states, or in claims to personal and/or religious authority and reject the modern states system altogether. Groups labelled as terrorist can therefore be classified as system-affirming or system-threatening. The former is a contained problem, but the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.

This article joins the growing scholarship on the ontological security needs of states. By focusing on state denial of historical crimes, the article will address the main point of contention among scholars who study ontological security, i.e. the question of whether identity pressures on states are mostly endogenously or exogenously generated. Through a study of the Turkish state's reluctance to apologize for the Armenian genocide, and the Japanese discomfort over the WWII atrocities, I argue that we can avoid tautology in our generalizations by introducing temporal and spatial dimensions to the argument. Inter-subjective pressures matter more at times when traditional routines defining the self are broken and are more likely to create ontological insecurity outside the West. The review of the Turkish and Japanese cases demonstrate that both social and individualistic approaches to ontological security are partly right, but also incomplete because neither takes into account the uneven expansion of international society or the effect this expansion has had on the identity of outsider states who were incorporated into the system at a later date.

AbstractGlobal IR is an encompassing term for a range of work that has set out to globalize the discipline in terms of its core concepts, assumptions, and substantive areas of study. Our symposium supports Global IR's goals but also offers some friendly critiques of the project with the aim of increasing its impact and durability. In this Introduction to the symposium, we posit that Global IR is vulnerable to a dynamic that limits its capacity to upend the status quo, which we term the 'essentialism trap'. Essentialism captures a range of commitments oriented around the notion that the world is constituted by pre-formed, fixed, internally coherent, and bounded social forms. The trap involves the overuse of essentialist categories by radical projects, a process that can result in the reinforcement of status quo categories and assumptions. With reference to previous openings in IR that have succumbed to this trap, we identify the dynamics that lead to this trap and suggest ways in which Global IR can avoid it by leaning more into relationalism and global history, and, thereby, fulfil the promise contained in the range of movements it speaks with and for.

Despite having key implications for fundamental political science questions, slavery as a global phenomenon has received little attention in the field. We argue that slavery played an important role in state-building and international order formation. To counter a historical U.S./Atlantic bias, we draw evidence mostly from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. We identify two slave-based paths to state construction. A "slaves as the state" logic saw slave soldiers and administrators used to overcome the constraints of indirect rule in centralizing power. In a "slaves under the state" model the economy was based on slave production, itself underpinned by institutionalized state coercion. Norms often prohibited enslavement within communities, thus externalizing demand. This led to militarized slaving, and fostered increasingly long-distance trade in slaves. The combination of these normative, military, and commercial factors formed international slaving orders.