CIAO DATE: 03/2012
Volume: 15, Issue: 1
January 2012
Peter Haldén
Research on climate change and conflict has been conducted in ways that may lead us to overlook risks of conflicts and miss opportunities to prevent them. In response, this article formulates an analytical framework based on hermeneutical perspectives on social action. The main argument is that climate factors are not the main drivers of conflict under conditions of climate change. Instead, the central mechanisms are how actors interpret their historical experiences and roles as guides for future actions and how international structures shape the scope of action in a constitutive fashion. Previous research has tended to construct the past as an objective assemblage of occurrences. However, the past can never be an ‘objective’ series of events and causal connections. Actors always interpret the past and construct it as meaning-laden history. History, in turn, is fundamentally ambiguous; it can be constructed as a story that has to be continued or one that needs to be broken with. An analysis of the relation between Ethiopia and Eritrea illustrates the theoretical framework. It concludes that despite their past enmity, there is no imminent risk of conflict in connection with climate change but strong reasons for both actors to maintain the status quo.
International organisations and policy diffusion: the global norm of lifelong learning (PDF)
Anja Jakobi
This article analyses the role of international organisations in global policy diffusion, drawing on the example of lifelong learning, a currently widely appreciated concept in education policy. I explain this success based on a sociological institutionalist framework, arguing that lifelong learning has become a global norm in education policy. For this purpose, I conduct a quantitative study of 99 countries from 1996 to 2004, showing how the idea of lifelong learning has been disseminated by international organisations and how states have reacted to this development. I first outline the theoretical framework, highlighting in particular the crucial role of international organisations. In a further step, I present the data and methods. In the third part, I analyse the activities of several international organisations on lifelong learning. In the fourth step, I show how lifelong learning has spread, distinguishing the idea of lifelong learning and reforms linked to it. Fifth, as the quantitative analysis shows, international organisations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union can explain a large part of dissemination when it comes to the idea of lifelong learning, but reforms are more dependent on national preconditions like the wealth of a country. In the conclusions, I sum up the article's main findings and outline further research areas linked to global diffusion processes.
Aid allocation of the emerging Central and Eastern European donors (PDF)
Balázs Szent-Iványi
This paper examines the main characteristics of the (re-)emerging foreign aid policies of the Visegrád countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), concentrating on the allocation of their aid resources. I adopt an econometric approach, similar to the ones used in the literature, for analysing the aid allocation of the OECD DAC donors. Using this approach, I examine the various factors that influence aid allocation of the Visegrád countries, using data for the years between 2001 and 2008. The most important conclusion is that the amount of aid a partner country gets from the four emerging donors is not influenced by the level of poverty or the previous performance of the recipients (measured by the level of economic growth or the quality of institutions). The main determining factor seems to be geographic proximity, as countries in the Western Balkans and the Post-Soviet region receive much more aid from the Visegrád countries than other recipients. Historical ties (pre-1989 development relations) and international obligations in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq are also found to be significant explanatory factors. This allocation is in line with the foreign political and economic interests of these new donors. Although there are clear similarities between the four donors, this paper also identifies some individual country characteristics.
Introduction to the sociology/ies of international relations (PDF)
Anne-Marie D'Aoust
The study of the history of the discipline of International Relations (IR) has come a long way since Stanley Hoffmann's 1977 seminal article ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’. With its focus on the development of IR in the United States, Hoffman's analysis sparked an incendiary debate that still goes on today about the discipline's origins, nature, goals, and assumptions. His insights hinged on fundamental questions about our work as IR scholars, ranging from the kind of valid scientific inquiries IR scholarship represents and/or requires (scientific dimension) to the aims of IR scholarship (normative dimensions), as well as the intellectual and social milieux in which IR scholars evolve and the practices they use and enact (sociological dimensions).
From epistemology to practice: a sociology of science for international relations (PDF)
Christian Bueger
Without question there is no shortage of reflexivity in the discipline of International Relations (IR), to the extent that after several ‘grand debates’ and numerous ‘turns’, it seems to have reached a certain intellectual ‘surfeit’. One of the reasons is certainly that many of the questions concerned are not logically solvable, and that debates on reflexivity tend to become affective if not religious from time to time. Another reason is that debates are often scholastic, and have nothing to do with either the social life of the researchers or the objects studied. This surfeit should not, however, be an argument for refraining from reflexive exercises. After all, standards of reflexivity are what distinguish scientific practices from those of other knowledge producers. Instead, this observation should lead us to reconsider the connection between the abstract, theoretical, conceptual and the practical everyday. Therefore, this contribution argues for an extended understanding of reflexivity centred on practice and taking advantage from works in the sociology of science.
Everyday practices of international relations: people in organizations (PDF)
Oliver Kessler, Xavier Guillaume
The idea that there are biases, blind spots or exclusionary if not oppressive forces in the very way scientific endeavour is organised still appears to be a rather strange idea. It runs counter to the ingrained idea that science is reflective. Science is still predominantly associated with the idea of a separation between values and facts and a clear separation between subject and object, that is, the normative ideal that researchers are detached from their ‘object of study’. With it comes the idea that knowledge and power need to be separated before the scientific enterprise can enjoy the fruits of objectivity and neutrality. True knowledge can only be produced where power is absent. Yet, regardless of whether one subscribes to, for instance, the Kuhnian notion of paradigm shifts, Wittgenstein's idea of therapy, or Foucault's arché,1 as soon as the well-trodden paths of positivist philosophy of science are re-situated within a series of relations, practices, institutions, and persons, questions regarding scientific endeavour stop being solely confined to objectively instituted rules of evaluation.
Accounting for the politics of language in the sociology of IR (PDF)
Anne-Marie D'Aoust
With its 2009 report on the state of the discipline of International Relations (IR), the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations aimed to tackle directly Ole Wæver's claim that IR ‘is and has been an American social science’ (Waever 1998: 687). Driven by the question of whether or not one could see national variations in the way scholars think about the discipline, and if one could agree on the existence of a single IR discipline, the TRIP project engaged in an ambitious ten-country survey about ‘the state of the discipline’ (Jordan et al. 2009). The choice of the ten countries surveyed then (Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States) reflects an obvious yet unmentioned selection criteria: these countries use English as the main language of scientific communication.1 If no consensus could be reached as to whether IR was an American discipline per se, there could at least be an implicit consensus that to be considered and acknowledged — and thus evaluated, measured, and assessed — the discipline(s) of IR had to be Anglophone by definition. This presumption also underpinned Stephen Walt's recent commentary on the persistent dominance of Anglo-Saxon scholarship in IR. ‘I’m still struck’, he admitted, ‘by the relative dearth of “big thinking” on global affairs from people outside the trans-Atlantic axis, including continental Europe. And by “big thinking” I mean ideas and arguments that immediately trigger debates that cross national boundaries, and become key elements in a global conversation’ (Walt 2011).
Beyond geography and social structure: disciplinary sociologies of power in international relations (PDF)
Kevin McMillan
Throughout their relatively brief history, studies examining the academic International Relations (IR) discipline have manifested an abiding concern with power and its uneven ‘distribution’. In this, of course, they mirror the object of their analysis. The same might also be said of the approach they typically use to study disciplinary power: as within IR theory itself, studies of the IR discipline have primarily identified and assessed power in geographical and territorial terms. There are two principal (and often overlapping) variants of this approach: the first, and most familiar, is national (state-centric); the second, increasingly popular, is imperial (world-systemic).