European Journal of International Relations

Senior ‘American School’ International Relations theorists — John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Robert Keohane, and others — have evinced a growing concern about a rise of technocratic hypothesis-testing, and a parallel decline in grand theory. We share many of their concerns; yet, we also find such discussions deeply unsatisfying. Grand theory descends into ‘technocracy’ because of reifying and depoliticizing processes deeply woven into both thought and the academic vocation. While confronting such processes is possible, these same scholars are among those who dismiss — and have long dismissed — the key intellectual moves that would sustain such a confrontation. That infelicitous combination, we argue, is unlikely to produce a renaissance of grand theory; indeed, past precedent suggests that it will further stifle it. To suggest how these theorists might better revalorize grand theory, we develop disciplinary-historical case studies around two key research programs: neo-functionalism and structural liberalism. Both were the product of an abiding commitment to grand theory; yet, both fell into reified and depoliticized stances that left little space for such theory. Breaking that cycle of reification and depoliticization might yet be possible; but it will require thinking beyond the call for ‘more grand theory.’

How does power work in practice? Much of the ‘stuff’ that state agents and other international actors do, on an everyday basis, remains impenetrable to existing International Relations theory. This is unfortunate, as the everyday performance of international practices actually helps shape world policy outcomes. In this article, we develop a framework to grasp the concrete workings of power in international politics. The notion of ‘emergent power’ bridges two different understandings of power: as capability or relation. Emergent power refers to the generation and deployment of endogenous resources — social skills and competences — generated in particular practices. The framework is illustrated with an in-depth analysis of the multilateral diplomatic process that led to the 2011 international intervention in Libya. Through a detailed account of the negotiations at the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union, the article demonstrates how, in practice, state representatives translate their skills into actual influence and generate a power politics that eschews structural analysis. We argue that seemingly trivial struggles over diplomatic competence within these three multilateral organizations played a crucial role in the intervention in Libya. A focus on practice resituates existing approaches to power and influence in International Relations, demonstrating that, in practice, power also emerges locally from social contexts.

This article analyses the phenomenon of rising powers from a historical materialist perspective. It (1) elaborates the key concepts of historical structures of world order, state–society complexes and transnational class formation, and (2) applies them to Brazil, Russia, India, China and other so-called ‘rising powers’ to account for the nature and extent of the challenge they pose to the existing institutions of global governance. A double argument is advanced: first, the integration of rising powers into the historical structure of global capitalism has reduced traditional sources of great power conflict, and made rising powers heavily dependent on the existing institutional framework established by the liberal West. This facilitates their integration into the existing governance order. However, within the limits of the existing order, two factors lend a heartland–contender cleavage to the politics of global governance: the rising powers’ relatively more statist, less market-driven forms of state, and their subsequent failure to be integrated into emergent transnational capitalist class structures. Consequently, it is not the global governance order itself, but its most liberal features, that are contested by rising powers. The result is that, in contrast to realist pessimism and liberal optimism, the rise of new powers is leading to a hybrid governance order that is both transnationally integrated and less liberal.

Closely associated with China’s growing prominence in international politics are discussions about how to understand Chinese history, and how such perspectives inform the way a stronger China may relate to the rest of the world. This article examines two narratives as cases, and considers how they fit against more careful historical scholarship. The first is the nationalist narrative dealing with Qing and Republican history, and the second is the narrative on the Chinese world order. Analyses of Chinese nationalism tend to see a more powerful China as being more assertive internationally, based in part on a belief in the need to address and overcome past wrongs. Studies of historical regional systems in Asia point to the role that a peaceful ‘Confucian’ ethos played in sustaining a stable Chinese-led order, and highlight the promise it holds for checking regional and international tensions. The two perspectives create an obvious tension when trying to understand China’s rise, which can suggest that using historical viewpoints to understand contemporary developments may be doomed to incoherence. This article argues that difficulties in applying knowledge of the past to analyses of China’s role in contemporary world politics indicate a relative inattentiveness to Chinese and Asian history. It illustrates how the nature of China’s rise may be more contingent on the external environment that it faces than popular received wisdom may indicate. The article suggests that a more extensive engagement with historical research and historiography can augment and enrich attempts to appreciate the context surrounding China’s rise.

In premodern East Asia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China rarely experienced anything like the type of religious violence that existed for centuries in historical Europe, despite having vibrant religious traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and numerous folk religions. How do we explain a region in which religion was generally not a part of the explanation for war and rebellion? A unique data set of over 950 entries of Chinese and Korean violence over a 473-year span allows granular measurement of religious violence. I argue that the inclusivist religions of historical East Asia did not easily lend themselves to appropriation by political leaders as a means of differentiating groups or justifying violence. Addressing the paucity of religious war in historical East Asia is theoretically important because it challenges a large body of scholarly literature that finds a universal causal relationship between religion and war that is empirically derived mainly from the experience of only Christianity and Islam. In contrast, it may be that certain types of religious traditions are less amenable to mass mobilization for violence. Moving beyond Christianity and Islam to include East Asian religious traditions promises both to address a potentially serious issue of selection bias and also to be a rich field for theorizing about the relationship between religion and war.

Scholars increasingly acknowledge that international institutions interact with each other, especially across issue areas such as trade and environment. However, scholars continue to dispute whether, and under what conditions, such regime interplay has positive or negative impacts on the effectiveness of international institutions. Existing scholarship debates whether international regimes may be compromised by inconsistencies, or whether enhanced reputational benefits make governments more likely to uphold commitments across components of a regime complex. This article examines how institutional complexity affects state behavior. Specifically, it analyzes how governments respond to regime inconsistency, and whether they continue adhering to their commitments in the absence of material or sociological non-compliance costs. The study tracks how state preferences and behavior changed over time when exposed to inconsistent international legal commitments regarding trade and regulatory rights in the South Pacific swordfish fishery. In this case, both World Trade Organization and United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea rules were at stake, and both dispute settlement forums accepted jurisdiction over the case. Nonetheless, Chile and the European Community resorted to negotiation outside of — but still bounded by — these established rules. Thus, this study finds that when multiple regimes regulate a particular situation, bargaining continues to take place within the boundaries established by those rules.

International negotiators have faced repeated stalemates in a number of significant areas. Justice issues are at the heart of the matter in many cases, as vividly illustrated by trade negotiations, particularly at the multilateral level. Yet, issues of justice have received limited attention in research on trade negotiation. This article asks: do trade negotiators who take justice principles into account arrive at more effective agreements? Specifically, it explores relationships between two types of justice during the negotiation process — procedural and distributive justice — and the effectiveness of outcomes (agreements) in 22 cases of bilateral and multilateral international trade negotiation. It evaluates the impacts of these types of justice on negotiation effectiveness. The results from analyses clearly demonstrate that procedural justice plays a central role in contributing to effective outcomes in both bilateral and multilateral trade cases. The correlations between procedural justice and effectiveness are very strong, and significantly stronger than between distributive justice and effectiveness. Moreover, distributive justice impacts upon effectiveness only when procedural justice principles are observed. These findings contribute knowledge about factors that enhance effective outcomes in international negotiations. They extend earlier work on justice in peace agreements and fill a gap in the research literature. They also provide advice for negotiators, and add important questions to the future research agenda.

Over the past decade, diaspora mobilization has become of increasing interest to International Relations scholars who study terrorism, civil wars and transnational social movements and networks. Nevertheless, an important area remains under-researched: conditions, causal mechanisms and processes of diaspora mobilization vis-a-vis emerging states, especially in a comparative perspective. This article asks why diaspora entrepreneurs in liberal states pursue the sovereignty goals of their original homelands through the institutional channels of their host-states, through transnational channels or use a dual-pronged approach. Empirically, the article focuses on a comparison between the Albanian, Armenian and Palestinian diasporas in the UK and their links to the emerging states of Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh and Palestine. Two variables act together to explain differences in mobilization patterns: the host-state’s foreign policy stance towards the homeland’s sovereignty goal; and diaspora positionality, the relative power diaspora entrepreneurs perceive as deriving from their social positions in a transnational space between host-state and homeland. If a host-state’s foreign policy stance is closed towards the sovereignty goal, but diaspora entrepreneurs experience their positionality as relatively strong vis-a-vis the host-state, they are more likely to mobilize through host-state channels, as in the Armenian case. If the foreign policy stance is closed towards the sovereignty goal, but the diaspora positionality is weak, activists are more likely to pursue transnational channels, as in the Palestinian case. If the foreign policy stance is open towards the sovereignty goal, but the diaspora positionality is weak, entrepreneurs are likely to engage with both channels, as in the Albanian case.

The Obama administration’s initial ambivalence toward democratic revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 points to a central puzzle in US foreign policy. In some countries, during some periods, America promotes liberal democracy; in other countries and periods, it tolerates or even supports authoritarianism. Why the variation? We focus on discrete decisions by a US President to retain a dictator or instead press for democracy in a client state S. Two conditions must be satisfied for a President to do the latter. (1) An exogenous domestic crisis must threaten S’s authoritarian regime. (2) The US domestic model of free-market liberal democracy must face no credible alternative in S’s region as a route to national development and security. A credible alternative model (e.g. communism or Islamism) threatens US interests by making dissenting elites in S more hostile to US hegemony and more accepting of the hegemony of America’s security rivals; that in turn makes free elections in S riskier for Washington. But when conditions (1) and (2) coincide, a new bargain emerges: S’s elites, now assenting to the US model, pledge to participate in the US-sponsored regional order, and Washington presses S’s regime into democratizing. We test our argument against two cases involving relations between the US and the Philippines, an authoritarian client until 1986. In a 1978 crisis, communism’s high credibility in Southeast Asia forced Jimmy Carter to continue supporting the Marcos dictatorship. In a 1985–86 crisis, communism’s lack of credibility allowed Ronald Reagan to drop Marcos and permit democracy.

When international human rights tribunals like the European Court of Human Rights find states responsible for human rights abuses, they ask governments to pay reparation to the victims, engage in symbolic measures, and enact the policy changes necessary to ensure that the violations do not recur. This article considers the conditions under which states comply with these rulings, especially when the tribunals are unable and often unwilling to provide strict enforcement. This article extends current theories about the domestic politics of compliance with international human rights law to the case of the European Court of Human Rights. This article analyzes a new, hand-coded data set on states’ compliance with over 1000 discrete obligations handed down by the European Court of Human Rights that ask states to change their human rights policies. The results of these analyses suggest that robust domestic institutions, particularly executive constraints, are the key to compliance with the European Court of Human Rights. When domestic institutions enforce the Court’s rulings, the results can be significant changes in states’ human rights policies and practices.

In this critical comment on the global democracy debate, I take stock of contemporary proposals for democratizing global governance. In the first part of the article, I show that, empirically, many international institutions are now evaluated in terms of their democratic credentials. At the same time, the notions of democracy that underpin such evaluations are often very formalistic. They focus on granting access to civil society organizations, making policy-relevant documents available online or establishing global parliamentary assemblies to give citizens a voice in the decision-making of international organizations. In the second part, I challenge this focus on formal procedures and argue that a normatively persuasive conception of global democracy would shift our focus to areas such as health, education and subsistence. Contrary to much contemporary thinking about global democracy, I thus defend the view that the institutions we have are sufficiently democratic. What is needed are not better procedures, but investments that help the weaker members of global society to make effective use of the democracy-relevant institutions that exist in contemporary international politics.