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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System-based research remains an important yet usually outdated and internally contradictory approach in political science and international relations.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physiology, cybernetics, and general system theory, the system-based approach popularised in the 1960s was cast away as outdated and ill-focused.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.

Abstract: This article maps the participation of women in Brazilian scientific production in the areas of Political Science and International Relations, from 2006 to 2016. To do so, six indicators were created, to measure women's participation in the production of master's dissertations, doctoral theses and scientific papers, as well as their participation as faculty members of graduate programs and their presence on editorial boards of important Brazilian Journals in these fields. The results revealed that, despite an increasing participation of women in recent years, the space they occupy is still underrepresented, especially when considering strategic positions related to education and research.

Southeast Asia's strategic location at major sea-lanes of communication, its previous role as a theatre of super power rivalries, its neighbourhood to China & India, its increasing economic prosperity & its inherent political instability have secured the region unrelenting attention of political scientists. Yet, the region is politically, economically & culturally highly diverse & fragmented. This diversity is also reflected in research on the politics of the region. Southeast Asian politics -- more than any other Asian sub-region -- thus defies sweeping generalizations about the state of the art. However, a paper committed to identify new research trends can not do justice to the diverging research agendas in the region's different countries. It must search for common themes which are relevant for understanding the political dynamics of the region & at the same time enrich the general discourses of the discipline. While this amounts to the squaring of the circle, the following sections nevertheless try to pinpoint where political scientists have made innovative contributions & where lacunae exist. It starts with a few general observations on recent trends in the study of Southeast Asian politics & then proceeds to international relations & comparative politics, two major sub-disciplines of political science. It focuses, albeit not exclusively, on regionalism & democratization as the dominant themes in the post-Cold War period. The paper concludes with a few proposals to improve the institutional context of (German) political scientists working on Southeast Asia. References. Adapted from the source document.

In this article the author is going to answer the question, that intrigues many researchers of international relations and political science – is it possible to build a grand theory explaining actions and behaviours of political, and international, entities? International relations are distinguished from other disciplines of science by its special character: they are polyarchic, plural, complex and impulsive. Th€is is why we find here, exceptional in contrary to other, more mature disciplines, diversity of opinions and answers to the question – in what way international relations shall be build? Searching for the right answer the researchers of international relations have to cross borders of many disciplines, also using research methods of sociologists, historians, economists, lawyers, psychologists and anthropologists. €There is a similar problem with political science, as the political matter is widely interpreted and, depending on the researcher and the analysed political system, its scope is wide as when using so called largo sense in the totalitarian states, where even the choice of school for a child has a political character or as when using so called strict sense in the democratic systems.