Exploration And Contestation In The Study Of World Politics

New insights into the interplay between conflict and cooperation, the impact of domestic political structures on foreign policy, the role of institutions, and the influence of worldviews and causal beliefs on decision-making.

New insights into the interplay between conflict and cooperation, the impact of domestic political structures on foreign policy, the role of institutions, and the influence of worldviews and causal beliefs on decision-making.

Asia is a crucial battleground for power and influence in the international system. It is also a theater of new experiments in regional cooperation that could redefine global order. Whose Ideas Matter? is the first book to explore the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system from the perspective of local actors, with Asian regional institutions as its main focus. There's no Asian equivalent of the EU or of NATO. Why has Asia, and in particular Southeast Asia, avoided such multilateral institutions? Most accounts focus on U.S. interests and perceptions or intraregional rivalries to explain the design and effectiveness of regional institutions in Asia such as SEATO, ASEAN, and the ASEAN Regional Forum. Amitav Acharya instead foregrounds the ideas of Asian policymakers, including their response to the global norms of sovereignty and nonintervention. Asian regional institutions are shaped by contestations and compromises involving emerging global norms and the preexisting beliefs and practices of local actors. Acharya terms this perspective "constitutive localization" and argues that international politics is not all about Western ideas and norms forcing their way into non-Western societies while the latter remain passive recipients. Rather, ideas are conditioned and accepted by local agents who shape the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system. Acharya sketches a normative trajectory of Asian regionalism that constitutes an important contribution to the global sovereignty regime and explains a remarkable continuity in the design and functions of Asian regional institutions.

The Theory of Contestation advances critical norms research in international relations. It scrutinises the uses of ‘contestation’ in international relations theories with regard to its descriptive and normative potential. To that end, critical investigations into international relations are conducted based on three thinking tools from public philosophy and the social sciences: The normativity premise, the diversity premise and cultural cosmopolitanism. The resulting theory of contestation entails four main features, namely types of norms, modes of contestation, segments of norms and the cycle of contestation. The theory distinguishes between the principle of contestedness and the practice of contestation and argues that, if contestedness is accepted as a meta-organising principle of global governance, regular access to contestation for all involved stakeholders will enhance legitimate governance in the global realm.

This Reader Is A Collection Of First-Rate Theoretical Engagements Relating To International Relations From Across India. The Class Character Of Contemporary International Law, Reassessing The Conceptual Foundations Of Imperialism, Mapping Human Security, Evaluating The Gaze Of Orientalism And Defending The Analytical Relevance Of Gender As A Lens To Examine National Security Are Issues Covered In The Theoretical Ambit Of This Volume. The Book Also Addresses Two Other Core Issues: Contesting The Delhi-Centricity Of The Discipline And Acknowledging The Relevance Of Theory To Policy.

China's guiding principle for foreign relations and its focus on states and regions has shifted a lot from the first 30 years of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, to 1978 and beyond, after reform and opening-up. However, PRC's diplomatic practice has been continuous, whether it was participation in the Korean War, breaking up with the former Soviet Union after a honeymoon period, China's self defense war over Sino-Indian border, participation in the Vietnam War, breakthrough in the Sino-US relation, or PRC's self defense war over the Sino-Vietnamese border. These historical events brought the need for theoretical study in International Politics (IP). The development of China's IP research was slow and filled with complications, but it signified a breakthrough from scratch. This book has filled gap by depicting a complete scroll of China's IP research in over 60 years since 1949. This book has followed two principles: one is according to the classification of the IP discipline and the other is to recommend adaptations according to China's actual conditions.

The field of international political economy gained prominence in the early 1970s--when the Arab oil embargo and other crises ended the postwar era of virtually unhindered economic growth in the United States and Europe--and today is an essential part of both political science and economics. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of this important field's development, the contrasting worldviews of its American and British schools, and the different ways scholars have sought to meet the challenges posed by an ever more complex and interdependent world economy. Benjamin Cohen explains the critical role played by the early "intellectual entrepreneurs," a generation of pioneering scholars determined to bridge the gap between international economics and international politics. Among them were brilliant thinkers like Robert Keohane, Susan Strange, and others whose legacies endure to the present day. Cohen shows how their personalities and the historical contexts in which they worked influenced how the field evolved. He examines the distinctly different insights of the American and British schools and addresses issues that have been central to the field's development, including systemic transformation, system governance, and the place of the sovereign state in formal analysis. The definitive intellectual history of international political economy, this book is the ideal volume for IPE scholars and those interested in learning more about the field.

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.