CIAO DATE: 10/2012
Volume: 15, Issue: 3
July 2012
A global journal with Central European roots: a vision for the JIRD (PDF)
Jozef Bátora
The JIRD is a global journal with Central European roots. We have established a diverse editorial team of scholars from Europe and North America linked first by a commitment to publish highest quality scholarship in international relations (IR) and development, broadly conceived, regardless of substantive or methodological focus; and second by a common awareness of the contribution the Central and East European (CEE) experience can make to the study of international politics. We envision the JIRD as a globally relevant journal with a CEE touch. This does not mean dealing primarily with CEE themes, although the region will naturally remain more strongly in focus than in comparable IR journals. More profoundly, it means nurturing both CEE IR scholarship and also the broader transnational scholarly context in which it develops.
Into the 'Heart of Darkness' — EU's civilising mission in the DR Congo
Gabi Schlag
‘Normative Power Europe', a concept introduced by Ian Manners in 2002 in order to describe the international identity of the European Union (EU), remains a lasting point of reference for academic as well as political debates. However, many contributions to this discussion tend to essentialise notions of a collective identity where normative self-depictions are uncritically used as an explanation for the EU's external actions. The main challenge, thus, is to reconstruct how a self is invented in the conduct of foreign and security policies as a discourse of locating others and articulating insecurities. These discursive processes, I will argue, are highly productive of hierarchical relations and justification narratives overlooked by most research on the EU's security and defence policies. The results of a reconstruction of EU discourse on the European Security and Defence Policy missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo lead to the preliminary conclusion that the EU might increasingly be imagined as a ‘civilising power', partly re-activating its imperial legacies of the 19th century.
Complexity theory and the War on Terror: understanding the self-organising dynamics of leaderless jihad
Antoine Bousquet
This article seeks to substantiate theoretically Marc Sageman's claims of a ‘leaderless jihad' through the application of the conceptual framework offered by the novel scientific paradigm of complexity theory. It is argued that jihadist networks, such as those behind the September 11 attacks and the bombings in London and Madrid, can be profitably understood in terms of complex adaptive systems, emergent organisations that coalesce and self-organise in a decentralised fashion. Complexity sheds new light on the jihadist movement by providing an account of the bottom-up self-organisation of its networks and the systems of distributed intelligence which allow those networks to operate and pursue successful attacks on the basis of partial and localised information, and this despite the strenuous efforts at counter-terrorism deployed by states.
The roles states play: a Meadian interactionist approach
David M. McCourt
Constructivist scholars have largely limited their view of how state action is socially constructed to the concepts of norms and identity. As for individuals, however, role-playing is also a core aspect of state activity. I demonstrate the potential of this concept for constructivists on the basis of a reconsideration of the roles states play in international politics - drawing on symbolic interactionism and in particular the thought of G.H. Mead. From a Meadian perspective, roles are sets of appropriate behaviours, not bundles of fixed duties; they emerge in interaction and give the actor a sense of its structure and the scope of possible action. Roles are thus the necessary social vehicle for action in its meaning-creating, identity-affirming sense. Using the illustration of the Suez Crisis of 1956, I develop a ‘Meadian interactionist' conceptual approach that builds on previous attempts to harness the potential of the role concept in International Relations (IR) and sharpens constructivist understandings of the links between role, identity, norms, and action in IR.
The social construction of terrorism: media, metaphors and policy implications
Alexander Spencer
The article illustrates a constructivist understanding of studying terrorism and counter-terrorism by applying metaphor analysis to a British tabloid media discourse on terrorism between 2001 and 2005 in The Sun newspaper. It identifies four conceptual metaphors constituting terrorism as a war, a crime, an uncivilised evil and as a disease, and it illustrates how these understandings make certain counter-terrorism policies such as a military response, judicial measures or immigration policies acceptable while at the same time excluding from consideration other options, such as negotiations. It thereby re-emphasises that a metaphorical understanding of political phenomena such as terrorism can give International Relations insights into how certain policies become possible while others remain outside of the range of options thought to be appropriate.
Parliamentary peace or partisan politics? Democracies' participation in the Iraq War
Patrick A. Mello
This paper seeks to explain democracies’ military participation in the Iraq War. Prior studies have identified institutional and partisan differences as potential explanatory factors for the observed variance. The interaction of institutions and partisanship, however, has gone largely unobserved. I argue that these factors must be analysed in conjunction: institutional constraints presume actors that fulfil their role as veto players to the executive. Likewise, partisan politics is embedded in institutional frames that enable or constrain decision-making. Hence I suggest a comparative approach that combines these factors to explain why some democracies joined the ad hoc coalition against Iraq and others did not. To investigate the interaction between institutions, partisanship and war participation I apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The analysis reveals that the conjunction of right-of-centre governments with an absence of both parliamentary veto rights and constitutional restrictions was sufficient for participation in the Iraq War. In turn, for countries where the constitution requires parliamentary approval of military deployments, the distribution of preferences within the legislature proved to be decisive for military participation or non-participation.