Suchergebnisse

Dissociation from international institutions, i.e., states turning away from international cooperation and organizations, is a widespread phenomenon today. It often leads to significant tensions between the states that turn away and those that remain committed to an institution. This introduction to a forum on dissociation from international institutions reviews the state of the art and develops a framework for analyzing the impact of dissociation on relations between departing and remaining states. It centers on the hypothesis that dissociation leads to two types of conflicts between states, ideational and distributive, with ideational conflicts more likely to increase tensions between states. The article then reviews the five cases of dissocia-tion examined in the other contributions to the forum and summarizes their main individual and comparative findings. Taken together, the five cases suggest that dissociation can exacerbate broader structural conflicts between states; that how parties perceive of conflict during the dissociation process matters for its effects on interstate relations and that an emphasis on ideational conflict leads to more confrontational relations; and that domestic politics matter greatly not only for whether dissociation occurs but also for its effects on interstate relations.

Despite abundant debates on humanitarian military interventions, there is yet little empirical knowledge about these operations and their effects due to a lack of systematized data. To stimulate the necessary comparative research, this article introduces a new data set on all humanitarian military interventions between 1946 and 2015. The data set outlines the interveners' proclaimed aims, mandates, and activities. Documentation of events in the target countries prior to, during, and after the interventions facilitates their evaluation. The data set consists of data matrices and structured case descriptions that document all coding decisions. A review of the spatial and temporal distribution of interveners and interventions refutes the prevalent view that the vast majority of humanitarian military interventions are conducted by Western states and that such missions subsided after the interventions in Afghanistan and Libya. The data set enables a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research. Despite its limited number of cases, it can reveal whether humanitarian military interventions generally decrease the duration and intensity of violence. Among other applications, it can help identify the conditions under which such interventions lead to an escalation or de-escalation of deadly violence.

Vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Krisensymptome liberaler Friedensstrategien entwickelt dieser Beitrag die Konturen eines Forschungsprogramms, das Krisen institutioneller Ordnungen und Prozesse der Dissoziation in den Blick nimmt. Es geht davon aus, dass das Ausscheren von Staaten aus institutionalisierten Ordnungen oft mit hohen Spannungen einhergeht. Die Aufgabe eines solchen Forschungsprogramms besteht folglich darin, die Dynamik derartiger Prozesse besser zu verstehen und zu prüfen, ob und wie sich Dissoziation weniger spannungsreich organisieren lässt.

Egon Bahr's 1963 speech outlined ways to achieve rapprochement with the Soviet Union through mutual recognition. The article asks in how far this approach can be useful for the current crisis in Russian-Western relations. It demonstrates that the policy-of-strength-approach has not reached the desired results so far, so that a change in strategy is needed. Along Bahr's line of argument, it shows that functional separation can help to reduce tensions. If this strategy succeeds, cooperation in fields of mutual interests - that has been low in the past years - should be revived. However, unlike the 1960s, there is a lack of international support for rapprochement with significant divides both within the transatlantic relations and within the European Union.