Domestically, revolutions cause massive upheavals of the political structures within a state, which affect its relations with neighboring states. On an international level, revolutionaries may actively export their ideology abroad by means of propaganda, by supporting revolutionary movements, or by directly deploying military forces to confront neighboring states. Revolutions threaten the prevailing international order because neighboring states perceive revolutions as a threat to their state’s sovereignty, which may prompt non-revolutionary states to intervene.
Marxism grants social and political theorists a most realistic, dynamic, and comprehensive framework that allows the study of the causes of war in its ‘totality’. Marxist theory applied in conjunction with the ‘three levels’ of analysis, which are, the individual, the state, and the international system, is relevant and significant to the study of international relations.
Ever since the beginning of International Politics as a social science, there has been a perpetual discourse between “realists” and “liberals” about the nature of interstate relations. The two sides cannot agree on whether there is a possibility of progress in the relations between states. In the present essay, the liberal internationalists’ belief that international progress is indeed possible will be critically approached. It will be argued that “liberals” understand progress as a process of spreading a Western model of democracy.
For a long time, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were viewed predominantly as socially and morally progressive organisations. Yet, this dominant perception of NGOs as do-gooders has been challenged in recent decades – especially after 9/11. This essay focuses on two of the many potential challenges to the political claims of NGOs: the inequality in the world polity and regressive globalisation.
This essay attempts to show how Waltz’s abandonment of the assumption of wicked human nature has led to the collapse of the Realist approach to international relations. In order to reveal this, a new concept of considerate/inconsiderate struggle for power is developed which enables us to understand the nature of power and relations of power in the theories of both Morgenthau and Waltz.
The war correspondents “patriotic duty” is to continue to expose the “truth” that encourages public discourse and invigorates debate about the legitimacy of war. If the first casualty of war is truth, it is the role of the war correspondent to find it and bring it back to life.
Despite Kofi Annan’s warning that ‘the United Nations is passing through the gravest crisis of its existence’ and a burst of diplomatic activity at the World Summit in 2005, reform of the UNSC has not been easy to achieve. This essay will explore the reasons behind the impasse as well as briefly considering possible alternatives. It will critically analyse the notion that failure to reform represents a ‘crisis’ at the UN.
In the very first sentence of the book entitled ‘Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid’, Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison pose the following question: “Is development a failure?” (1998: 1). It might seem rhetorical at first, but by no means is it so.
Realists maintain that the nature of International Politics is a constant, at times blood thirsty, struggle for power in an anarchical environment. The occurrence of fundamental change, such as the end of power politics, a self-interested human nature, and the threat of war, in the nature of International Politics is considered flawed. Realists provide evidence for this by pointing firstly to the consistency of human nature, the structure of power, and thirdly to patterns in history.
The spectre of a debt crisis, the first signs of which were seen in the Third World in the 1970s, and the fear of world finances’ disintegration, led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) to propose Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) to the developing world. This essay will start with a description of the long term advantages of SAPs, as advocated by the IMF and the WB (including elements of the neo-liberal philosophy presented as an ideological basis for the programmes) before assessing the short term disadvantages of SAPs – largely revolving around unsustainable growth.
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