Suchergebnisse

Maintains that the biotechnology revolution will forever change the structure of global production. Agronomists are being replaced by molecular biologists & control over the raw materials of biotechnology is becoming a divisive international issue. Information obtained from interviews with four agricultural researchers & questionnaires completed by 237 agricultural biotechnologists in US universities reveals important shifts in ranking the criteria for research, indicating that the everyday choices of agricultural scientists will ultimately determine the impact of biotechnology on developing countries. More than half of all 1990s US doctorates in the agricultural sciences were awarded to foreign students, mostly from developing nations. The impact of the distancing between researcher & farmer is discussed, along with the increasing specialization of agricultural scientists, & the need for sophisticated laboratories to enable graduates to utilize their skills. Scientists produced by US universities are not focused on the rural poor, multidisciplinary studies, or on-site fieldwork, which puts their agendas at odds with the needs of small-scale farmers. Suggestions are made for ways to bridge the chasm. J. Lindroth

Since World War II national trade union organizations have become involved in the internal political affairs of other countries, usually through the labor organizations in these countries. Soviet trade unions, a precursor and model in this respect, supported Soviet foreign policy through their international trade union contacts. United States unions played an important role in promoting the Marshall Plan, winning trade union support for it in Western Europe, and countering the opposition of communist-oriented trade unions in France and Italy. British and French unions were active in the colonial territories of their countries and often continued their influence after these territories achieved independence. United States unions have been active in Latin America and in the less developed areas of the Caribbean and Africa.

The global trend toward increased involvement by non-governmental agencies and private parties has enriched the mix of actors operating at all levels of interstate and intersociety relations in the Caribbean. While many of these new relations persist in the traditional ties with the former colonial metropolises, there is evidence of new relations in the political, economic, gender, academic, and environmental areas. Even as this article examines many of these transnational relationships, it is not sanguine about the disappearance any time soon of the linguistic, ethnocultural, and political barriers that have historically kept the Caribbean balkanized.

Examines the global trend toward increased involvement by nongovernmental agencies & private parties that have enriched the mix of actors operating at all levels of interstate & intersociety relations in the Caribbean. It is posited that there are new relations in the political, economic, gender, academic, & environmental areas. The persistence of the linguistic, ethnocultural, & political barriers that have historically kept the Caribbean balkanized are considered. Adapted from the source document.

World politics is changing, but our conceptual paradigms have not kept pace. The classic state-centric paradigm assumes that states are the only significant actors in world politics and that they act as units. Diverse domestic interests have effects on international politics only through governmental foreign policy channels. Intersocietal interactions are relegated to a category of secondary importance–the "environment" of interstate politics. As Karl Kaiser has pointed out, the reality of international politics has never totally corresponded to this model. Nevertheless, the model was approximated in the eighteenth century when foreign policy decisions were taken by small groups of persons acting within an environment that was less obtrusive and complex than the present one.

In this essay I suggest a newcomer to the list of types of transnational relationship discussed in this volume. This is the relationship that arises from the use of a common-property natural environment. These relations are not new, of course, and have led to conflict and accommodations at various levels for centuries, as Innis's work on the codfisheries testifies. As world population grows and technology broadens, both demand and capacity to exploit these international common property resources in ways that will harm other users have also increased. Yet international law has not been able to devise rights of tenure for international property as efficient as those for, say, agricultural land. This resulting lack of suitable concepts of ownership (or sovereignty) has, therefore, been one source of the loss of control by central governments that is frequently mentioned in the transnational relations literature.

The past forty years has seen a marked increase in the proliferation of
transnational actors in the international system. The rise of these actors
has sparked a continuing debate within the field of international relations
on how they influence state action. This emergent literature on
?transnational studies? within international relations has mainly pitted
advocates of an approach that views states as the dominant force in world
politics versus those who see the rise of transnational actors as empirical
proof that the primacy of states as actors in the international system is
being replaced. New literature in the mid-1990s tried to move transnational
studies beyond these debates of the past. What both sides failed to grasp
was that, because both looked to how transnational actors could affect
domestic state behavior, they really in the end shared the same research
question (it was only their approach to the question that differed). The
result is a thin account of how transnational actors matter and a series of
measurement problems due to the underlying concepts being much too general.
This article introduces a new theoretical framework for testing the ability
of transnational actors to influence domestic state behavior.

Canadian-American relations have tended to bore statesmen and scholars who long to be where the action is. According to one scholar, "study of Canadian-American relations tells one almost nothing about the big problems facing the world," while in a classic essay Arnold Wolfers used the unguarded border as an example of "indifference to power." If we view world politics with "realist" assumptions that unified states are the only actors, force is the major source of power, and solving the military security dilemma is their overwhelming objective, then Canadian-American relations are indeed dull.