Constructing The World Polity

Constructing the World Polity brings together in one collection the theoretical ideas of one of the most influential International Relations theorists of our time. These essays, with a new introduction, and comprehensive connective sections, present Ruggie's ideas and their application to critical policy questions of the post-Cold War international order. Themes covered include: * International Organization. How the 'new Institutionalism' differs from the old. * The System of States. Explorations of political structure, social time, and territorial space in the world polity. * Making History. America and the issue of 'agency' in the post-Cold Was era. NATO and the future transatlantic security community. The United Nations and the collective use of force.

This interdisciplinary book investigates the problematization of global challenges in world politics by analyzing what they are and how they come to be. Offering a conceptual framework, including four modes of construction—universalizing, bundling, upscaling, and creating urgency—this book provides a heuristic method for understanding how the process of rendering an issue a “global challenge” unfolds. It examines the role of the global challenges discourse, which may either reinforce or challenge the dominant orders of world politics, such as the capitalist market-based system and the liberal international order. As a consequence, the global challenges discourse facilitates the emergence of new actors and policy fields. The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners of global governance, international organizations, and, more broadly, international political economy and international relations.

Language matters in international relations. Constructivists have contributed the insight that global politics is shaped by the way agents narrate history and produce discourses about themselves and about the world. This insight has induced a profound reexamination of assumptions in the study of international relations. The contributors to this volume examine (Part I) the critical linguistic/discursive techniques of postmodernists and constructivists, and apply them (Part II) to international relations.

The contributors contrast this world-polity perspective to other approaches to understanding globalization, including realist and neo-realist analyses in the field of international relations, and world-system theory and interstate competition theory in sociology.

This book gives a novel understanding of the globalization debate as well as the structure of world politics. Drawing on Foucault and Waltz it suggests 'polity' as a third model of political structure beyond hierarchy and anarchy.

Gender constructions do not stop at state boundaries. Global understandings of masculinity and femininity can emerge out of the matrix of international politics. Proposing an innovative conception of global politics by de-emphasizing state actors and instead analyzing competing transnational discourses, The Global Construction of Gender focuses specifically on people who work at home for pay. Prügl explores the debates and rhetoric surrounding home-based workers that have taken place in global movements and multilateral organizations since the early 1900s in order to trace changing conceptions of gender over the course of this century. As Prügl relates, home-based workers, both urban and rural, engage in a broad array of activities: they "sew garments, embroider, make lace, roll cigarettes, weave carpets, peel shrimp, prepare food, polish plastic, process insurance claims, edit manuscripts, and assemble artificial flowers, umbrellas, and jewelry." These (mostly female) workers are widely recognized as underpaid and exploited. In investigating their plight, Prügl describes the rules that have separated home and work and, in the process, created a diverse array of distinctly gendered identities, including that of the working mother as a social problem, the wage-earning worker as a male breadwinner, the crafts-producing woman as the symbol of Third World nationhood, the woman micro-entrepreneur as the heroine of structural adjustment, and the new androgynous home-based consultant/freelancer/teleworker as the exemplary worker of a flexibly organized global economy.

This volume demonstrates the application of the constructivist approach to the analysis of foreign policy (i.e. states' actions in a world of states). Part I introduce constructivism for foreign policy studies. Part II presents five model case studies -- the Cold War, Francoism, the two Chinas, inter-American relations, and Islam in U.S. foreign policy. Part III reviews their results.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from Amnesty International and Oxfam to Greenpeace and Save the Children are now key players in global politics. This accessible and informative textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the significant role and increasing participation of NGOs in world politics. Peter Willetts examines the variety of different NGOs, their structure, membership and activities, and their complex relationship with social movements and civil society. He makes us aware that there are many more NGOs exercising influence in the United Nations system than the few famous ones. Conventional thinking is challenged in a radical manner on four questions: the extent of the engagement of NGOs in global policy- making; the status of NGOs within international law; the role of NGOs as crucial pioneers in the creation of the Internet; and the need to integrate NGOs within mainstream international relations theory. This is the definitive guide to this crucial area within international politics and should be required reading for students, NGO activists, and policy-makers.