"Präsident Putins Rede auf der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz im Februar 2007 signalisiert ein neues Selbstbewusstsein der russischen Eliten. Als Nuklear- und Energiemacht fordert der Kreml, als gleichberechtigter Partner anerkannt zu werden, und verfolgt gleichzeitig skrupellos nationale Interessen. Eine neue internationale Konstellation entsteht aber nicht nur durch das Wiedererstarken Russlands, sondern durch die gleichzeitige Identitätskrise der EU, durch die Möglichkeit einer Niederlage der USA im Irak und durch den Aufstieg der BRIC-Staaten." (Autorenreferat)
The contemporary global community is increasingly interdependent and confronted with systemic risks posed by the actions and interactions of actors existing beneath the level of formal institutions, often operating outside effective governance structures. Frequently, these actors are human agents, such as rogue traders or aggressive financial innovators, terrorists, groups of dissidents, or unauthorized sources of sensitive or secret information about government or private sector activities. In other instances, influential "actors" take the form of climate change, communications technologies, or socioeconomic globalization. Although these individual forces may be small relative to state governments or international institutions, or may operate on long time scales, the changes they catalyze can pose significant challenges to the analysis and practice of international relations through the operation of complex feedbacks and interactions of individual agents and interconnected systems. We call these challenges "femtorisks," and emphasize their importance for two reasons. First, in isolation, they may be inconsequential and semiautonomous; but when embedded in complex adaptive systems, characterized by individual agents able to change, learn from experience, and pursue their own agendas, the strategic interaction between actors can propel systems down paths of increasing, even global, instability. Second, because their influence stems from complex interactions at interfaces of multiple systems (e.g., social, financial, political, technological, ecological, etc.), femtorisks challenge standard approaches to risk assessment, as higher-order consequences cascade across the boundaries of socially constructed complex systems. We argue that new approaches to assessing and managing systemic risk in international relations are required, inspired by principles of evolutionary theory and development of resilient ecological systems.
When we speak of an international system, we start with the presumption that there is something habitual and regular about the behavior of the nations that constitute it. Unfortunately, the concept of an international system has had a singularly hollow ring in the works of many scholars who have employed the term. It is frequently compared to an incredibly complicated watch or thermostat, or alternatively it is defined so abstractly that it would appear to have no specific empirical referents—and therefore practically everything in one way or another would qualify as a "system."The abstract and shadowy significance of the concept in international relations studies has retarded its usefulness for exploring the regularities that underlie the interactions of nations. More than ever before, however, the actions of nations have multiple reverberations on each other and can be ascribed meaning only within the context of the relations of many nations with each other. Because the configuration of inter-nation relations has become increasingly complex, it has become more and more difficult to trace out these relations and determine what structure, if any, there is in the "system."We shall see later that any definition of a system is arbitrary to the extent that its inclusion and exclusion rules are arbitrary. If we can specify the simplifying assumptions which create this arbitrariness, however, then the problematic cases included or excluded in a system or component subsystems can usually be identified and explained. This approach seems preferable to positing systems criteria that are either ambiguous or non-operational, enriching the vocabulary but not the analysis.
Este artículo reseña: Diane K. Denis and John J. McConnell (Eds). Governance : an international perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005 ; Governance: An International Perspective is a two-volume collection of articles published in academic journals, and is part of a series called 'Corporate Governance in the New Economy', comprising seven other books about several aspects of governance: Auditing, Ownership, Life Cycle of Corporate Governance, Political and Legal Perspectives of Corporate Governance, Governance & Expropriation, Governance in the Public Sector, and Directors & Boards. As other collections of articles, the book is oriented mainly towards academics, although it could also be of interest to students of accounting, finance, business or economics, and also to practitioners
International studies is a diverse field. Its central planning, unfortunately, is usually tied to the search for financial support. Hence, many questions of internal organization and purpose are often not addressed. Some of them relating to specialist centers, undergraduate general education, secondary and primary schools, and serving business clienteles are discussed.
