Suchergebnisse

How do states sustain international order during crises? Drawing on the political philosophy of Lyotard and through an empirical examination of the Anglo-American international order during the 1956 Suez Crisis, Bially Mattern demonstrates that states can (and do) use representational force--a forceful but non-physical form of power exercised through language--to stabilize international identity and in turn international order.

Soft power—the ability to achieve desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion—has become an important part of scholarly thinking and policy practice with respect to world politics. And yet attraction, the core component of soft power, has been largely neglected in scholarly research. Research has been undertaken, policy suggestions offered, and ethical conclusions about soft power drawn all on the basis of implicit and often unacknowledged assumptions about attraction. As I argue here, this is problematic because neither of the most prominent assumptions— attraction as natural and attraction as constructed through persuasive argument—are feasible or logical in the context of world politics. In fact, as I argue, in the context of world politics it makes far more sense to model attraction as a relationship that is constructed through representational force—a nonphysical but nevertheless coercive form of power that is exercised through language. Insofar as attraction is sociolinguistically constructed through representational force, soft power should be not be understood in juxtaposition to hard power but as a continuation of it by different means. This analytic insight in turn demands some practical and normative reformulations about soft power. ————————————————————————

International Relations scholars often treat international order as a byproduct of threats of military violence. Recent scholarship, however, has focused attention on security communities — nonviolent international orders that develop as a by-product of interstate collective identity. Yet it is unclear how these regimes could work during crises when collective identity is disrupted. This article argues that during such periods member states can use representational force, a form of power exercised through language, to stabilize their collective identity. Through an analysis of the Anglo-American security community during the 1956 Suez Crisis I demonstrate how both states relied on nonphysical but forceful expressions of power to `fasten' their identity against the disintegrating effects of their dispute. One effect was to stabilize the security community and preserve nonviolent order. While this illuminates one process by which security communities can weather crises, it also highlights that getting beyond guns does not necessarily mean getting beyond force.