The most outstanding aspect of ‘America’s Allies and War’ is the systematic and even-handed manner in which it demolishes popular notions of alliance politics, such as the depiction of European NATO allies as free-riding pacifists, whilst making an important theoretical contribution to the burden-sharing literature and International Relations scholarship in general.
Theorists conceive of knowledge and its relations to reality differently. Knowledge of the world is ‘reality’, yet this ‘reality’ is socially constructed through discourse. Looking through the Realist lens, the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes an affair of two rationally acting Great Powers locked in a power struggle owing to the inducements of a bipolar anarchic international system.
Changes in the production and consumption of pop music have shown the Globalization of Culture in its most effective form. Changes in the Korean pop industry illustrate a process whereby ‘foreign’ pop music is internalized, adapted and then pushed back into the wider world as a new style of pop which has been culturally filtered.
Any research on the Greek Civil War should have three levels of analysis: the international, the regional, and the national. These three terms could respectively be translated into the fragile relationship and power balancing among the Allies; the spread of communist regimes in the Balkans; and the internal struggle for the modernization of the political system, the constitutional issue, and the conduct of free elections.
The EU, by using non-normative means to diffuse norms and by not being able to detach itself from state self-interest, has regressed from being a normative power in the international system. This repositioning places the EU on a middle ground between ‘normative’ power and political realism.
At the root of poverty, lies a lack of access to modern energy. Most of the Millennium Development Goals cannot be fulfilled without first meeting the energy needs of the 1.6 billion people without access to modern energy services. How could South-South Cooperation initiatives help to overcome this problem?
This essay is concerned with the motivations that drive states to intervene, and argues that their actions are never wholly disinterested. The scope of this essay will be limited to interventions which third-parties have justified on humanitarian grounds, looking in particular at the case of the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.
The R2P is heralded by many as making political power more responsible and accountable, both to the domestic citizenry and ‘international community’. It has sought to democratise humanitarian intervention in a way which reconceptualises sovereignty as responsibility and looks to protect the ‘victim other’ from imminent mass death at the hands of irresponsible state power.
Security is constructed through processes of social interaction, but cannot be defined as existing only within the speech act. Hence, the definition of security in terms of a discourse-action sequence is problematic, inasmuch as it fails to recognise the complexity of the construction of security in global politics.
Throughout the war what Stalin wanted most from the Western Powers was their commitment to a second front, economic aid and their agreement to the restoration of Russia’s 1941 borders. Although his methods evolved, these objectives did not change.
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