Suchergebnisse

International order is easy to take for granted, but it shapes our world. Governing arrangements allow us to eat food imported from other countries, live safely from nuclear war, travel to foreign cities, profit from our savings, and much else. Yet, the textbook explanation for how order changes-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains new rules of international order after winning a major war-fails to explain a lot of events. Instead of thinking of "the" international order as a single thing, this book explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. It sheds light on a huge range of topics, from US-China rivalry to climate change.

"Oil is the world's single most important commodity and its political effects are pervasive. Jeff Colgan extends the idea of the resource curse into the realm of international relations, exploring how countries form their foreign policy preferences and intentions. Why are some but not all oil-exporting 'petrostates' aggressive? To answer this question, a theory of aggressive foreign policy preferences is developed and then tested, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Petro-Aggression shows that oil creates incentives that increase a petrostate's aggression, but also incentives for the opposite. The net effect depends critically on its domestic politics, especially the preferences of its leader. Revolutionary leaders are especially significant. Using case studies including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, this book offers new insight into why oil politics has a central role in global peace and conflict"--

AbstractMany international conflicts are in some way related to energy, ever since oil became the world's preeminent strategic commodity in the early 20th century. I argue that the most important energy-related variable for international conflict is a state's net oil import position. Oil politics tends to appear in one of three ways in security studies. Some have emphasized resource wars; others have focused on the needs of oil importers; and still others on the pathologies of oil exporters. These disparate approaches, largely isolated from each other, can better be understood as relating to a single explanatory variable. Lots of other variables matter but none are as central as net oil imports. This means that to understand energy and security, a political economy framework is a necessity. For oil exporters, external petro-aggression and internal pathologies of the resource curse are the key mechanisms. For oil importers, energy consumption needs generate a plethora of mechanisms that complicate conflict dynamics. A sophisticated understanding of these mechanisms can improve our understanding of both national and global security.

AbstractScholars of international relations (IR) from the United States, like any country, view the world with particular perspectives and beliefs that shape their perceptions, judgments, and worldviews. These perspectives have the potential to affect the answers to a host of important questions—in part by shaping the questions that get asked in the first place. All scholars are potentially affected by national bias, but American bias matters more than others. This special issue focuses on two issues: attention and accuracy in IR research. While previous scholarship has raised principally normative or theoretical concerns about American dominance in IR, our work is heavily empirical and engages directly with the field's mainstream neopositivist approach. The collected articles provide specific, fine-grained examples of how American perspectives matter for IR, using evidence from survey experiments, quantitative datasets, and more. Our evidence suggests that American perspectives, left unexamined, negatively affect our field's research. Still, the essays in this special issue remain bullish about the field's neopositivist project overall. We also offer concrete steps for taking on the problems we identify, and improving our field's scholarship.

How does climate change affect the politics of military bases? The United States alone has hundreds of overseas bases that require continuous coordination with host governments. I argue that climate change can create knock-on environmental problems associated with a base's infrastructure or waste. Those knock-on problems create a mix of subnational, international, and transnational political contestation that raises the political costs of overseas bases and could even rupture an international relationship. I probe the plausibility of the theoretical framework using new evidence from Greenland. Between 1953 and 1967, the US Army maintained secret bases in Greenland as precursors for a nuclear ballistic missile complex. The bases were eventually abandoned, leaving considerable waste behind. Climate change is now poised to remobilize these pollutants into the surface water, creating a risk for human settlements. The case could be the proverbial canary in the coal mine for future politics surrounding overseas military bases.

The resource curse literature suggests two stylized facts about oil-producing states ('petrostates') that are not easily reconciled with each other. On one hand, petrostates experience more frequent civil wars than non-petrostates. On the other hand, petrostates have more robust and long-lasting autocratic regimes. This is puzzling because one might expect that one form of instability would lead to the other, as is typical in non-petrostates. If petrostates are more prone to domestic conflict than non-petrostates, and conflicts are opportunities for regime transition and democratization, why do we not observe such transitions more frequently in petrostates? I argue that despite frequent conflicts, rebels rarely succeed in violently overthrowing a petrostate regime or otherwise forcing regime transition. This is because oil generates financial resources that can be used by both an incumbent government and rebels to fund armed conflict, and an incumbent government typically has greater access to these resources. In an analysis of non-democracies for 1946-2004, I also find that oil inhibits democratization in petrostates, but only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Peaceful pathways to democracy remain open in petrostates. These findings significantly alter our understanding of resource curse. Many scholars argue that oil inhibits democracy because of rentier politics, but this standard interpretation is incomplete. Oil appears to inhibit democratization only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Ten of the eleven transitions to democracy in petrostates since 1945 occurred without significant domestic conflict. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The resource curse literature suggests two stylized facts about oil-producing states ('petrostates') that are not easily reconciled with each other. On one hand, petrostates experience more frequent civil wars than non-petrostates. On the other hand, petrostates have more robust and long-lasting autocratic regimes. This is puzzling because one might expect that one form of instability would lead to the other, as is typical in non-petrostates. If petrostates are more prone to domestic conflict than non-petrostates, and conflicts are opportunities for regime transition and democratization, why do we not observe such transitions more frequently in petrostates? I argue that despite frequent conflicts, rebels rarely succeed in violently overthrowing a petrostate regime or otherwise forcing regime transition. This is because oil generates financial resources that can be used by both an incumbent government and rebels to fund armed conflict, and an incumbent government typically has greater access to these resources. In an analysis of non-democracies for 1946–2004, I also find that oil inhibits democratization in petrostates, but only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Peaceful pathways to democracy remain open in petrostates. These findings significantly alter our understanding of resource curse. Many scholars argue that oil inhibits democracy because of rentier politics, but this standard interpretation is incomplete. Oil appears to inhibit democratization only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Ten of the eleven transitions to democracy in petrostates since 1945 occurred without significant domestic conflict.