Suchergebnisse

The article deals with the "Quantum mind"hypothesis which has been elaborated in recent works of Alexander Wendt. It is ultimately significant to analyze this hypothesis and to expand on its difficulties and possible inconsistencies given Wendt's credentials in IR theorizing. It allows us to develop a new approach and promising research program on the basis of the hypothesis and its critical reflection. Wendt's quantum physicalism (or holism) implies serious philosophical injury and outstanding usage of different science disciplines' apparatus including physics, biology, and psychology. Thought-provoking approach of Wendt boosts researching efforts within the field of political philosophy, world politics and international relations. The main feature of the hypothesis is the idea of quantum nature in social and political processes which appears to be the consequence of epistemological authority of current science. Alexander Wendt proposes several explanations for quantum foundations within the political and social processes including wide-known "agent-structure" dilemma. According to him, invisibility of social structures does not lead to denial of its existence. Firstly, social structures emerge from the space of possibilities and are not directly dependant on material factors. Secondly, invisibility and its acceptance in different areas are parts of science clarification in many areas including quantum physics. The article discuses how quantum physics principles such as particle-wave dualism, superposition and size absoluteness can be useful in social and political studies. This allows us to demonstrate the given hypothesi' potential in research field of social sciences with regard to international relations and world politics.

We should theorize about international relations (IR) exclusively on the basis of systemic variables because the whole cannot be known 'through the study of its parts'. This injunction is familiar and pervasive across our discipline. Yet, IR theorists who seek to explain international outcomes by focusing exclusively on systemic variables are increasingly engaging in a sort of unilateral disarmament. Despite all its shortcomings, foreign policy analysis (FPA) gets us much further than systemic IR theory in understanding the real world of international politics. While much depends on precisely what 'slice' of international political life we are seeking to explain, FPA captures how international outcomes are increasingly determined by factors that are sourced at the level of domestic politics. The argument here draws on close empirical investigation of US-European relations, as well as contributions to this journal by Mearsheimer and Gilpin, and other recent works in the research literature.

International Relations (IR) scholars have devoted considerable attention to domestic adoption of international norms, because application of these norms occurs largely through domestic political systems. This article argues that research on norm adoption is hampered by characteristics of current IR theory that result in a lack of appropriate attention to key actors and processes. The role of corporations in norm adoption is largely ignored, reflecting a wider failure to theorise their role in international politics. The agency of domestic groups that stand to benefit from application of international norms is underplayed, reflecting the heavy emphasis on structural factors that characterises the dominant constructivist approach to analysis of international norms. The interplay between material and ideational resources and strategies in norm contests receives inadequate attention, reflecting a continuing tendency to see constructivism and rationalism as alternative explanatory frameworks. The article presents a model of domestic norm adoption that allows these shortcomings to be addressed, with implications for IR theory generally. Adapted from the source document.

This book offers a novel contribution to the study of post-Cold War European defence. Interdisciplinary in approach, it uses the insights of EU law to assess the utility of existing theoretical accounts of European defence cooperation. Dyson and Konstadinides link legal and IR scholarship to undertake a detailed exploration of the structural factors which facilitate and hinder closer cooperation in the field of defence. Exploring the explanatory power of Neorealism, they focus on the balance of threat as a driver of the European Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). This book critiques the assumption inherent in governance accounts of CSDP that a transition from the 'sovereign' to the 'functional' will be possible in this policy area. "European Defence Cooperation in EU Law and IR Theory" sheds new light on the factors underpinning the development of the CSDP and the potential for more extensive cooperation in trans-Atlantic relations. The capacity of legal analysis to provide important empirical insight and of international relations theory to enrich legal scholarship by contextualizing it within its political context, makes this book of great relevance to scholars from both disciplines

Influenced especially by Tzvetan Todorov's analysis of early modern European travelogues, travel literature has provided a strong heuristic for comprehending the development of modern and contemporary expressions of the international. This heuristic tends to emphasize the overpowering frameworks of the figure of inversion and the mechanism of othering to make sense of the relation between identity and alterity. This article retains the intuition that travel literature can provide for an heuristic of this relation while exploring an alternative way to decenter the European centeredness and modernist core of contemporary theories of international relations (IR) and calling on a non-European and non-modern travelogue to provide for such heuristic. Specifically, it explores some aspects of classical Greece as offering both a similar and a dissimilar experience to alterity by analyzing Herodotus' travel literature and the ways by which he translates difference into the realm of sameness. Calling upon Herodotus' writing shows that narration of difference does not necessarily imply othering and thus opens up new ways to conceptualize identity and alterity.