Max Weber’s concept of legitimate authority rests on three principal pillars: tradition; legality; ideology. In this essay, I propose a fourth pillar – power, and show how it can be as important a source of legitimacy as tradition, legality, and ideology. In asserting that power itself can be politically legitimating, I do not imply that it is devoid of any support from the other three pillars.
The questions of how the concept of global governance can be used to describe the prevailing global order and what is the most appropriate way of formulating the concept of global governance challenge the limits of traditional IR theory to explain a world where the shape and importance of individual states is changing and the role of agents above and below the state is increasing.
This article is a response to the pervasive rhetoric that globalisation, in particular the associated implication that capitalism is an expanding global force that is inextricably enmeshed within globalisation, has been and continues to erode the state.
The aim of this piece is not to provide a conclusive assessment, but to consider different aspects of Gorbachev and Putin’s leadership. In examining leader-type and surveying conditions, light is shed upon the significance of these individuals and upon the different purposes of leadership during their premierships.
Constructivism as an approach to International Political Theory is not a homogeneous or unified entity. More so than many other approaches it has great rifts between its individual theorists. This paper will focus mostly on the constructivism outlined by Wendt and, towards the end of of the paper, will briefly contrast it with that of Kratochwil.
This essay is a critical reading of Negri and Hardt’s ‘Empire’, focusing on how the ontological shifts in the production and socio-political disciplinarity function not as an immanent contradiction of globalised capital, but instead form a reified, zero-weight mode of infinite subsumption.
Since the end of the Cold War, the policies followed by Russia towards the United States and the European Union have defied simple analysis. In the decade and a half since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has at times appeared an ally and at times has been much more hostile.
War has been an omnipresent aspect of the international order. Consequently, ‘realism’ sees conflict and war as the defining aspects of international relations. Conversely, ‘idealists’ posit that human reason/different forms of societal organization can curb or even eliminate belligerency. This essay draws on ‘critical theory’ to show that realism is essentially limited in its analysis of the world system.
Lebow’s assertion that human beings can reach spiritual satisfaction through ever increasing levels of material consumption is not supported by empirical evidence. Recent psychological research sharply contradicts his hypothesis. According to James, a twenty-five year old American is between three and ten times more likely to be suffering from depression today than in 1950.
This piece aims to influence campaigns which are combating violence against women and to help organisations holding governments to account for the violence that States do not take adequate action against.
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