Suchergebnisse

Martin Wight's fragmentary comments entitled 'The Disunity of Mankind' are by no means a major work, but they are interesting in the context of contemporary cosmopolitanism and in terms of helping us to assess the substantive content of Wight's approach to International Relations.

This paper examines notions of power in relation to evidence-informed policy making and explores four key areas. First, I outline contemporary conceptualisations of how power operates in society; second, I spotlight the implications of power inequalities for how evidence is used by policy makers (and present the policy 'agora'; a discursively controlled paradigm of ideology and epistemology which serves to distinguish between the types of evidence that policy makers will and won't engage with); third, I then define what I consider as evidence 'misuse'; before finishing with an analysis of why evidence misuse materialises and how its enactment might be minimised.

The editors of the special issue, in their call for papers for this special issue, expressed a degree of disquiet at the current state of International Relations theory, but the situation is both better and worse than they suggest. On the one hand, in some areas of the discipline, there has been real progress over the last decade. The producers of liberal and realist International Relations theory may not have the kind of standing in the social/human sciences as the 'Grand Theorists' identified by Quentin Skinner in his seminal mid-1980s' collection, but they have a great deal to say about how the world works, and the world would have been a better place over the last decade or so if more notice had been taken of what they did say. On the other hand, the range of late modern theorists who brought some of Skinner's Grand Theorists into the reckoning in the 1980s have, in the main, failed to deliver on the promises made in that decade. The state of International Relations theory in this neck of the woods is indeed a cause for concern; there is a pressing need for 'critical problem-solving' theory, that is, theory that relates directly to real-world problems but approaches them from the perspective of the underdog.

The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, as initially set out in the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty of 2001, is difficult to place within the usual framework of IR theories (liberal internationalist, realist or radical) or International Political Theories (communitarian, cosmopolitan). This is primarily because by framing the issue of intervention in terms of the protection of civilians, the devisers of the doctrine attempted to de-politicise the act of intervention. An examination of the ICISS Report, the UN's World Summit Outcome Document of 2005 and the experience of the application of the doctrine to the Libyan crisis of 2011 demonstrates that this attempt has not succeeded, and that the 'antipolitical' nature of Responsibility to Protect is a weakness not a strength. Still, the doctrine has had considerable success in changing the terms under which intervention is discussed at the UN and elsewhere.

The phrase 'knowledge adoption' refers to the often-complicated process by which policy makers 'take on board' evidence. While models have been put forward to explain this activity, this paper argues that such models are flawed and fail to fully address those complexities affecting the successful realisation of knowledge adoption efforts. Existing frameworks are examined, critiqued and an alternative, sociologically based approach presented. It is argued that this alternative conceptualisation provides a more effective account of the knowledge adoption process. The paper illustrates how this model has been tested and examines its implications for both research impact and evidence-informed policy making.

[On Diogenes, who coined the term 'cosmopolitan'] 'If only more contemporary self-styled cosmopolitans drank water from their hands, ate human flesh, hugged statues and masturbated in public. … Diogenes's "cosmopolitanism" is much more of an anti-political stance than some sort of banal internationalism'.