Suchergebnisse

In this book, Arturo Santa-Cruz advances an understanding of power as a social relationship and applies it consistently to the economic realm in United States relations with other countries of the Western Hemisphere. Following the academic and popular debate on the ebb and flow of US hegemony, this work centers the analysis in a critical case for the exercise of US power through its economic statecraft: the Americas - its historical zone of influence. The rationale for the regional focus is methodological: if it can be shown that Washington's sway has decreased in the area since the early 1970s, when the discussion about this matter started, it can be safely assumed that the same has occurred in other latitudes. The analysis focuses on three regions: North America, Central America and South America. Since each region contains countries that have at times maintained very different relationships with the United States, the findings contribute to a better understanding of the practice of US power in the sub-region in question, adding greater variability to the overall results.

Sinicizing International Relations brings civilizational politics back to the studies of international relations and questions the notion of a rising Chinese nation by deconstructing the possibility of looking at China in its entirety. The works of scholars writing on China are influenced by their own historical and philosophical backgrounds and the daily political and economic conditions in which they live and work. Their writings on China rising intrinsically reflect their encounters and choice. Studying the rise of China involves interactions between the identity of the observers who are doing the studying and the identities of China. Each set of interacting identities comprises choices on at least three levels: civilizational, national, and (sub)ethnic. As a result, intellectual choices of identity become intrinsic to international relations scholarship, and international relations acquire complicated cultural meanings in East Asian communities, which contemporary international relations theories fail to comprehend.