Deviance In International Relations

Rogue states' have been high on the policy agenda for many years but their theoretical significance for international relations has remained poorly understood. In contrast to the bulk of writings on 'rogue states' that address them merely as a policy challenge, this book studies what we can learn from deviance about international politics.

Rogue states' have been high on the policy agenda for many years but their theoretical significance for international relations has remained poorly understood. In contrast to the bulk of writings on 'rogue states' that address them merely as a policy challenge, this book studies what we can learn from deviance about international politics.

​The scholarly study of international relations tends to go over the same cases, issues, and themes. This book addresses this by challenging readers to think creatively about international politics. It highlights some of the strangest and rarest phenomena in diplomacy and world politics. Comprised of a series of vignettes and organized by common themes like nonsensical borders, quasi-countries, and diplomatic taboos, Weird IR encourages readers to think critically about the discipline without losing one's sense of humor completely.

A long list of countries - labelled outcasts, pariahs and rogues - have failed to meet international standards of good conduct. In the Cold War years Rhodesia, Israel, Chile, Taiwan and South Africa, among others, featured among the ranks of the disreputable. In modern world politics, the serious sinners not only include states: terrorists, rebels, criminals and mercenaries also participate in the great game of who gets what, when and how. Highlighting the rules of good behaviour that both state and non-state actors have violated, Geldenhuys takes a novel approach that breaks through the narrow parameters of the rogue state paradigm and of other state-centric perspectives.

Rogue states pursue weapons of mass destruction, support terrorism, violate human rights, engage in acts of territorial aggression, and pose a threat to the international community. Recent debates and policy shifts regarding Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan reflect the uneven attempts to contend with regimes that pursue deviant behavior. In this timely new work, Miroslav Nincic illuminates the complex issues and policy choices surrounding clashes between international society and states that challenge the majority's espoused interests and values. As conventional approaches to international relations lose their relevance in a changing world, Nincic's work provides new and necessary frameworks and perspectives. Nincic explores recent events and develops theoretical models of contemporary asymmetrical power relations among states to offer a systematic account of the genesis, trajectory, and motivations of renegade regimes. He discusses how the pursuit of policies that defy international norms is often motivated by a regime's desire for greater domestic control. From this starting point, Nincic considers states' deviant behavior through two stages: the first is the initial decision to defy key aspects of the international normative order, and the second is the manner in which subsequent behavior is shaped by the international community's responses. In addressing attempts to control pariah states, Nincic assesses the effectiveness of sanctions and military responses. He provocatively argues that comprehensive economic sanctions can lead to a restructuring of the renegade regime's ideology and economy that ultimately strengthens its grip on power. In his chapter on military intervention, Nincic argues that force or the threat of force against a rogue state frequently triggers a protective reflex among its citizens, inspiring them to rally around the government's goals and values. Military threats, Nincic concludes, produce several kinds of consequences and their impact needs to be better understood.

This book examines the linkage between deviance and norm change in international politics. It draws on an original theoretical perspective grounded in the sociology of deviance to study the violations of norms and rules in the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. As such, this project provides a unique conceptual framework and applies it to highly salient issues in the contemporary international security environment. The theoretical/conceptual chapters are accompanied by three extensive case studies: Iran, North Korea, and India.

A comparative historical examination of the international systemic and societal origins and effects of Al Qaeda and similar historical actors.

Despite the increase in the number of studies in international relations using concepts from a role theory perspective, scholarship continues to assume that a state’s own expectations of what role it should play on the world stage is shared among domestic political actors. Cristian Cantir and Juliet Kaarbo have gathered a leading team of internationally distinguished international relations scholars to draw on decades of research in foreign policy analysis to explore points of internal contestation of national role conceptions (NRCs) and the effects and outcomes of contestation between domestic political actors. Nine detailed comparative case studies have been selected for the purpose of theoretical exploration, with an eye to illustrating the relevance of role contestation in a diversity of settings, including variation in period, geographic area, unit of analysis, and aspects of the domestic political process. This edited book includes a number of pioneering insights into how the domestic political process can have a crucial effect on how a country behaves at the global level.