Suchergebnisse

Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- Pol.civ. 215 c

As a tenured, full professor in an endowed peace studies chair at my home institution, I chose to spend my 2009–10 sabbatical year as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Why? As I saw it, my colleagues who teach chemistry need to work with electron spectrometers; my colleagues who teach ethnomusicology need to perform with Javanese gamelans. In an analogous way, I believed that my own work with Congress would energize and refocus my research and teaching. All subfields of intellectual inquiry have their blind spots, and within the subfield of peace studies the largest blind spot may be the perspective that I thought might be gained from being a foreign policy insider. Again and again, my courses began and ended with students asking me to explain how or why the United States behaved and behaves in ways that baffle the rest of the world. I found myself saying something about "political will" and believed that if I were to answer that question in a way that felt remotely satisfying, I needed to spend some time on the ground observing how the "sausage" was made.

International law is marginalized in the books that introduce the majority of US university & college students to International Relations as a field of study. Textbook writers commonly state that international law is most difficult or least effective as applied to issues of security or high politics due to the primacy of state survival & the cardinal rule of sovereignty. Ironically, however, the typical chapter or unit on international law focuses precisely on high politics or law related to the use of force. The synthetic impression, reading these texts together, is that international law is something distinct from global governance or the development of international regimes. If the evaluative judgment is that law is weak & the text gives much less attention to the areas where it is functioning effectively, that is a qualitatively different sort of omission than writing an abstract that has to leave out details in order to cover the main points. The author concludes with three recommendations for improvement. 2 Tables, 23 References. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines the propositions that the rise of new peace movements in Eastern Europe, inde pendent from and in some cases opposed to the work of official peace councils, is a function of some li mited degree of church autonomy in those countries, and that communication with Western peace mo vements or sentiments through Church-related bodies is a necessary but not sufficient condition for in dependent peace efforts in Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany are examined case by case (in order from least to most Church involvement in an independent peace move ment in the 1980s). In terms of transnational alignment, it appears that if there were no independent peace movement in the West, and no ecumenical bodies, religious NGOs or international church organi zations assisting East-West communication and exchange, the work of independent peace activists in Eastern Europe would be even more difficult.