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Many political scientists have hailed the apparent existence of Democratic Peace--the absence of wars between democracies--as proof that a world of democracies would be a world without war. This idea challenges traditional approaches to international politics, which focus on the balance of power between states regardless of their political systems. It also has important implications for world politics, especially as President Clinton has made the promotion of democracy a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy on the grounds that democracies never fight each other.This volume examines historical cases that shed light on various arguments that might account for a Democratic Peace. Focusing on inte...
Bridges and Boundaries offers a conversation between what might loosely be described as traditionalist diplomatic and military historians, and political scientists who employ qualitative case study methods to examine international relations. The book opens with a series of chapters discussing differences, commonalities, and opportunities for cross-fertilization between the two disciplines.To help focus the dialogue on real events and research, the volume then revisits three empirical topics that have been studied at length by members of both disciplines: British hegemony in the nineteenth century; diplomacy in the interwar period and the causes of World War II; and the origins and course of the Cold War. For each of these subjects, a political scientist, a historian, and a commentator reflect on how disciplinary "guild rules" have shaped the study of international events. The book closes with incisive overviews by Robert Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder. Bridges and Boundaries explores how historians and political scientists can learn from one another and illustrates the possibilities that arise when open-minded scholars from different disciplines sit down to talk.
All academic disciplines periodically appraise their effectiveness, evaluating the progress of previous scholarship and judging which approaches are useful and which are not. Although no field could survive if it did nothing but appraise its progress, occasional appraisals are important and if done well can help advance the field. This book investigates how international relations theorists can better equip themselves to determine the state of scholarly work in their field. It takes as its starting point Imre Lakatos's influential theory of scientific change, and in particular his methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP). It uses MSRP to organize its analysis of major research programs over the last several decades and uses MSRP's criteria for theoretical progress to evaluate these programs. The contributors appraise the progress of institutional theory, varieties of realist and liberal theory, operational code analysis, and other research programs in international relations. Their analyses reveal the strengths and limits of Lakatosian criteria and the need for metatheoretical metrics for evaluating scientific progress.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Causal Inquiry in International Relations defends a new, philosophically-informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. Its central claim is that there is an underlying logic to all causal inquiry, at the core of which is the search for empirical evidence capable of ruling out competing accounts of how specific events were brought about. Although this crucial fact is obscured by the 'culture of generalizati...
Realism is one of the core theories within the field of international relations, and it generally posits a state system characterized by anarchy where states act in what they perceive to be their own self interests. It is a controversial theory, and it has many opponents. Yet effective debate among realists and those who identify with other schools of thought has diminished dramatically over time. As Patrick James argues in Realism and International Relations, scholars in the field have become dissatisfied with results from exchanges in words alone. He contends that translation of the vast amount of information in the field into knowledge requires a greater emphasis on communication beyond t...
"Challenging this assumption, Peacemaking by Democracies breaks down the category of "democracy" to argue that differences in structural autonomy among democratic states have a lot to do with how foreign security policies are chosen and international negotiations are carried out. The more structural autonomy the foreign security policy executive possesses, the greater the policy independence from public and legislative opinion it is able to achieve."--Jacket.
International Relations and Scientific Progress contends that a theory focusing on the structure of the international system explains a wider and more interesting range of events in world politics than other theories. Such theorizing appears to be out of favor as the result of the apparent failure by structural realism, the most prominent system-level theory over the last two decades, on any number of fronts--most notably an inability to anticipate the ending of the Cold War and its aftermath. This new book is put forward as the most comprehensive and innovative theoretical work on paradigms in international relations since the publication of Theory of International Politics, which created s...
Why have states throughout history regularly underestimated dangers to their survival? Why have some states been able to mobilize their material resources effectively to balance against threats, while others have not been able to do so? The phenomenon of "underbalancing" is a common but woefully underexamined behavior in international politics. Underbalancing occurs when states fail to recognize dangerous threats, choose not to react to them, or respond in paltry and imprudent ways. It is a response that directly contradicts the core prediction of structural realism's balance-of-power theory--that states motivated to survive as autonomous entities are coherent actors that, when confronted by...
Experts analyze the effect of cultural interests on the foreign policy of states in the Caspian region, including Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan.
11 Citizenship and an international political sociology -- 12 Advancing 'development' through an IPS approach -- 13 The global environment -- 14 Finance -- 15 Feminist international political sociology - international political sociology feminism -- 16 Global elites -- 17 Global governance -- 18 Health, medicine and the bio-sciences -- 19 Mobilization -- 20 Mobility -- 21 Straddling national and international politics: revisiting the secular assumptions -- 22 Reflexive sociology and international political economy -- 23 Security studies