Suchergebnisse

Science, technology, and art in international relations : origins and prospects / J.P. Singh -- A role for phenomenology in ir scholarship / Alena Drieschova -- How to discomfort a worldview? : social sciences, surveillance technologies, and defamiliarization / Rocco Bellanova and Ann Rudinow Saetnan -- World-viewing as world-making : feminist technoscience, international relations, and the aesthetics of the anthropocene / Cara Daggett -- Emerging science and technologies : diplomacy, security, and governance / Margaret E. Kosal -- Constructed "cyber" realities & international relations theory / Ben Wagner -- Constructing an inventive order of rights : the geopolitics of island-building in transnational waters / Venilla Rajaguru -- IR's constitutive absence and the promise of STAIR / Maximilian Mayer -- "The heart is a pump. Or is it?" : the politics of biomedicine, the objectivity of science, and the way we know the world / Christina Hellmich -- Thinking through the science, technology, and art of medicine : an agenda for international relations / Alison Howell -- Oceanic artscapes and international relations / Camellia Webb-Gannon -- From the globe to the germ, and back / Michele Acuto -- Science in the international political economy / David J Hornsby -- Creativity as a worldview : power in collaborative practices / Willow Williamson -- Reflexivity and political analysis : if everything is socially constructed, how can we construct theories? / Peter M. Haas -- Art and agency : alternative spaces for subaltern voices / Mónica Trujillo-López -- Cookbooks, politics, and culture / Ilan Zvi Baron -- Human/nonhuman assemblages in STAIR : understanding distributed agency in international relations / Kathleen P. J. Brennan -- Resistance to a worldview / Ritu Mathur.

A review essay on a book by Heikki Patomaki, The Political Economy of Global Security: War, Future Crises and Changes in Global Governance (London & New York: Routledge, 2008).

In recent decades, the discipline of International Relations (IR) has experienced both dramatic institutional growth and unprecedented intellectual enrichment. And yet, unlike neighbouring disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, History and Comparative Literature, it has still not generated any 'big ideas' that have impacted across the human sciences. Why is this? And what can be done about it? This article provides an answer in three steps. First, it traces the problem to IR's enduring definition as a subfield of Political Science. Second, it argues that IR should be re-grounded in its own disciplinary problematique: the consequences of (societal) multiplicity. And finally, it shows how this re-grounding unlocks the transdisciplinary potential of IR. Specifically, 'uneven and combined development' provides an example of an IR 'big idea' that could travel to other disciplines: for by operationalizing the consequences of multiplicity, it reveals the causal and constitutive significance of 'the international' for the social world as a whole.

System-based research remains an important yet usually outdated and internally contradictory approach in political science and international relations. Based on concepts borrowed from physiology, cybernetics, and general system theory, the system-based approach popularised in the 1960s was cast away as outdated and ill-focused. Despite those systems, the theory was developed in natural sciences, eventually creating a paradigm more applicable to domestic and international politics. The weakest element of past systems (like the one proposed by D. Easton) was that they did not allow for a sudden and catastrophic transformation and lacked emergence. This paper aims to present a model that would allow for the system's ordinary and catastrophic transformation. The complex adaptive system features were defined using relevant literature on a paradigm of complexity. Connecting it with the propositions of D. Easton, R. Axelrod, and M. Cohen, as well as R. Jervis, such a model was constructed. The theoretical introduction is supplanted with a general case study of the early phases of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. The model mirrors the complex systems' dynamics, considering the agent-structure problem.

Following widespread use in political marketing and polling, focus groups are slowly gaining recognition as a useful and legitimate method in political science. Focus groups can, however, be far more than just a secondary qualitative method to primary quantitative public opinion research: they can be used to study the micro-level process of social construction. The process in which key sub-groups collectively contest and justify the actions of elite political actors via shared values is one way to study how legitimacy is conferred. This article therefore argues that focus groups can be particularly useful for research that examines everyday narratives in world politics.