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We have witnessed the emergence of a growing literature in the sociology of international relations (IR) which shows how IR produces its knowledge about the world, what its modes of inclusion and exclusion consist of, how newness emerges, and how contingencies are produced and its scientific vocabulary given meaning. While many of these contributions reconstruct the sociology of IR by examining syllabi, books, journals, the geography of authorships, and/or conference participations, ours points to the organizational and quotidian dimensions of IR: practices of IR, from everyday work done in front of some screen to the publication of new articles and books, are continuously reproduced by people in organizations like universities, scholarly associations, conferences, publishers, state bureaucracies, ministries, and research funding institutions. How can we account for the fact that practitioners and organizations are not disembodied vectors of the scientific endeavor but its agents? To pursue these questions, we first briefly review the link between post-positivist thought and sociology of IR, show how the current literature in the sociology of IR is structured, and point to organizations and people as a possible locus to understand IR better as an academic field. The second part looks deeper into the sociology of organizations. The third part tries to outline how the effects of organizations can be made visible by reconstructing everyday practices. Adapted from the source document.

Der Beitrag behandelt die Rolle von Weltorganisationen im Menschenrechtsmonitoring. In Abgrenzung zu eher klassischen Theorien der Internationalen Beziehungen, in denen internationale Organisationen als Gegenpart zur staatlich verfassten Politik konzipiert werden, betont der Beitrag die Eigenständigkeit internationaler Organisationen. Das politische Moment von Organisationen wird in der Sinngebung von Welt und in der Konstitution und Verstetigung von Beobachtungsperspektiven gesehen. Genau dies zeichnet Weltorganisationen aus. Dabei erfolgt die vergleichende Beobachtung von Welt anhand von Maßstäben, die aus einem weltgesellschaftlichen Erwartungshorizont abgeleitet werden. Die Autoren zeigen, wie die Menschenrechte und deren Einhaltung als Beobachtungsperspektiven durch das Menschenrechtsmonitoring verstetigt werden. Gleichzeitig erläutern sie das Leistungsvermögen des Menschenrechtsmonitoring und schließen mit Überlegungen zur Reversibilität von Weltorganisationen, die aus der Kumulation inverser Effekte resultieren kann. Inverse Effekte können etwa durch eine Entlegitimierung des Normenkatalogs, wenn beispielsweise fortwährend ein Nicht-Erreichen der Einhaltung von Menschenrechten dokumentiert wird, oder durch erklärte Devianz vom Normenkatalog entstehen und damit die (welt-)ordungsgenerierende Funktion von Weltorganisationen untergraben.Im letzen Kapitel zeigen die Autoren Ansatzpunkte für die weitere Weltorganisationen-Forschung auf. (ICB2)

"The Public Sphere" published on by Oxford University Press.

The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War have led to a semantic shift: Not the avoidance of threats, so the argument goes, but the management of risks characterizes contemporary security practices. By juxtaposing the well-known security "dilemma" with the new "security paradox," this contribution argues that a redefinition of "uncertainty" and "probability" is constitutive for this semantic shift. We argue that new security concerns like terrorism have (re)introduced "unstructured" uncertainty as the rationale for new security practices. To conceptualize this re-opening, we propose a topology of risk, uncertainty, and probability theories that highlights the multiple and conflicting logics of security policies currently at play.

This article analyses legal aspects of the `war on terror'. It argues that, by making recourse to a semantic of risk, danger and, in particular, precaution, the `war on terror' blurs crucial political and legal categories of public and private, of peace and war, of combatants and civilians, thus redefining the relationship between political responsibility, time and security. As a consequence, the extrajudicial killing of individuals becomes a form of risk management that takes place beyond established mechanisms of accountability.