The independence of Australian’s foreign policy will never be absolute. It can only become more independent through possibility thinking rather than being “weighed down by myths of past centuries”, including the taking of a more flexible, independent line in its bilateral relationship with the United States.
Several scholars have emphasised the apparent ‘Eurocentricity’ of modern international law and have hence argued that its development has been “a European story”. Is the realm of international law like a play that is being performed, in which the Western or European states are the actors on stage and their colonies, the Third World states, are only the spectators who are affected by what is happening on stage but do not have any real possibility of participating?
The enlargements of 1995 and 2007 demonstrate that even a small number of additions to the EU require deeper alterations to its institutions.
One of the last major books about war in international relations is paradoxically a book forecasting the end of the object it analyses. Retreat from Doomsday: the Obsolescence of Major War by John Mueller was released in 1989 and has become a classic reading making the author one of the most influential authors on the topic of war.
This paper will focus on the question whether the emergence of democracy in Colombia can be explained based on the assumptions of the ‘sequentialist’ or ‘preconditionist’ theories as suggested, amongst many others, by Fareed Zakaria or Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, or if, by contrast, the views of ‘gradualists’ or ‘universalists’ such as Sheri Berman or Thomas Carothers are more indicated to explain and analyze Colombia’s democratic past, present and future.
In attempting to determine whether the most recent economic crisis or that of 1998 is more damaging for the Russian economy it is important to acknowledge, preliminarily, that these two crises are different. The international economic, political and strategic contexts in which they occurred were different; the origins were different; the triggers were different; the indirect victims are different; and, most importantly for this analysis, the recoveries were and will be different.
The human rights discourse has become a paradigm in international relations, with the transition from the international system to an international society. A vital aspect of that paradigm is the differentiation between adult and child, which has also been primarily instituted by the West. The supremacy of this definition has served the supremacy of the West in the human rights question.
The 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees is “one of the most widely accepted international norms, and remains the sole legally binding international instrument that provides specific protection to refugees”. Yet the Convention is neither fit for purpose nor universally accepted.
There is an incompatibility between the purpose and mode of Middle Eastern economic development to date and the fraught efforts towards forms of democracy across the region. Additionally, the importance of certain economic developments to specific actors has successfully outweighed the importance of democracy in the region, and will persist in doing so for the foreseeable future.
The concept of security is changing. The critical approaches that have emerged to challenge traditional ones in recent decades have earned significant support. A definitive characteristic that binds these critical security schools is their rejection of realism. In security language, critical approaches agree that the state does not deserve the privilege of being the solitary referent object of security studies.
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