NATO's security discourse after the Cold War: representing the West

This book provides a critical investigation into the discursive processes through which the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)reproduced a geopolitical order after the end of the Cold War and the demise of its constitutive enemy, the Soviet Union.

The theme that dare not speak its name: Geopolitik, geopolitics and German foreign policy since unification

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the emergence of a new security imaginary in the foreign policy discourse in Germany during the 1990s and to determine whether it constitutes a return of Geopolitik in German foreign policy making. Does the re- appearance of geopolitical terms and expressions in the official and the academic discourses in post-unification Germany indicate such a shift? The essay will argue that the claims about a return of Geopolitik cannot be sustained. To the extent that the rhetoric of German government officials changes during the 1990s, this does not produce a coherent geopolitical security imaginary that stands diametrically opposed to the definition of political and institutional spaces of the Bonner Republik.

Unwritten law in Hobbesian political thought

In Hobbesian terminology, ‘unwritten laws’ are natural laws enforced within a polity, by a non-sovereign judge, without some previous public promulgation. This article discusses the idea in the light of successive Hobbesian accounts of ‘law’ and ‘obligation’. Between De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes dropped the idea that natural law is strictly speaking law, but he continued to believe unwritten laws must form a part of any legal system. He was unable to explain how such a law could claim a legal status. His loyalty to the notion, in spite of all the trouble that it caused, is a sign of his belief that moral knowledge is readily accessible to all.

Applying Jackson’s methodological ideal-types: problems of differentiation and classification

In The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, Patrick Jackson situates methodologies in International Relations in relation to their underlying philosophical assumptions. One of his aims is to map International Relations debates in a way that ‘capture[s] current controversies’ (p. 40). This ambition is overstated: whilst Jackson’s typology is useful as a clarificatory tool, (re)classifying existing scholarship in International Relations is more problematic. One problem with Jackson’s approach is that he tends to run together the philosophical assumptions which decisively differentiate his methodologies (by stipulating a distinctive warrant for knowledge claims) and the explanatory strategies that are employed to generate such knowledge claims, suggesting that the latter are entailed by the former. In fact, the explanatory strategies which Jackson associates with each methodology reflect conventional practice in International Relations just as much as they reflect philosophical assumptions. This makes it more difficult to identify each methodology at work than Jackson implies. I illustrate this point through a critical analysis of Jackson’s controversial reclassification of Waltz as an analyticist, showing that whilst Jackson’s typology helps to expose inconsistencies in Waltz’s approach, it does not fully support the proposed reclassification. The conventional aspect of methodologies in International Relations also raises questions about the limits of Jackson’s ‘engaged pluralism’.

National interest to global reform: patterns of reasoning in British foreign policy discourse

Discussion of the national interest often focuses on how Britain's influence can be maximized, rather than on the goals that influence serves. Yet what gives content to claims about the national interest is the means-ends reasoning which links interests to deeper goals. In ideal-typical terms, this can take two forms. The first, and more common, approach is conservative: it infers national interests and the goals they advance from existing policies and commitments. The second is reformist: it starts by specifying national goals and then asks how they are best advanced under particular conditions. New Labour's foreign policy discourse is notable for its explicit use of a reformist approach. Indeed, Gordon Brown's vision of a 'new global society' not only identifies global reform as a key means of fulfilling national goals, but also thereby extends the concept of the national interest well beyond a narrow concern with national security.

Cyber warfare: a multidisciplinary analysis

Cyber warfare is an increasingly important emerging phenomenon in international relations. The focus of this edited volume is on this notion of cyber warfare, meaning interstate cyber aggression, as distinct from cyber-terrorism or cyber-crime. Waging warfare in cyberspace has the capacity to be as devastating as any conventional means of conducting armed conflict. However, while there is a growing amount of literature on the subject within disciplines, there has been very little work done on cyber warfare across disciplines, which necessarily limits our understanding of it. This book is a major multidisciplinary analysis of cyber warfare, featuring contributions by world-leading experts from a mixture of academic and professional backgrounds.

Half-remembered quotations from mostly forgotten speeches: the limits of Labour’s European policy discourse

This article uses discourse analysis to study the continuities in British foreign policy thinking within the Labour party from the 1960s to the present day. Using representative extracts from speeches by Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it identifies the ideational consis- tencies in the leaders’ attitudes to: Empire; federalism in the EEC/EU; and laying down conditions that have to be met before any constructive engagement with ‘Europe’ can be countenanced. We argue that these consistencies, spanning a 50-year period, exemplify a certain stagnation both within Labour’s European discourses and within British foreign policy thinking more widely. We develop the idea that Labour party thinking has been crucially framed by both small ‘c’ conser- vative and upper-case Conservative ideology, popularised by Winston Churchill in his ‘three circles’ model of British foreign policy.

The Cold War in retrospect : 25 years after its end

This special issue of Cold War History offers a retrospective on the end of the Cold War, 25 years after its peaceful conclusion. This peaceful conclusion is an achievement that cannot be celebrated enough, and we must continue to build international relations in conflict and co-operation on this awareness of our common humanity and our common human fallibility.

The politics of the environment: a survey

The book is a collection of cutting edge essay on the politics of the environment covering and analysing important topics, such as the Kyoto protocol and deforestation, this book provides extensive coverage of all aspects of environmental politics. This unbiased survey is of interest to students, academics, business people and general researchers. Four sections present a thorough overview of current issues in the politics of the environment in historical perspective. The first section consists of essays written by a variety of academic and other experts on topics including Globalization: The Environment and Development Debate; The State, International Relations and the Environment; Environmental Movements; Mass Media and Environmental Politics; and The Ethical Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

Procedural justice, not absorptive capacity, matters in multinational enterprise ICT transfers

This paper empirically tests the effectiveness of information and communications technology (ICT) knowledge transfer and adoption in the multinational enterprise (MNE) as an issue of critical importance to contemporary MNE functioning. In contrast to mainstream thinking on absorptive capacity, but in line with prevailing international business theory, our research supports the proposition that perceptions of procedural justice, rather than absorptive capacity, determine effectiveness, especially in cases of high tacit knowledge transfers. Data was collected from senior ICT representatives in 86 Canadian subsidiaries of foreign owned MNEs. Each of these subsidiaries recently experienced a significant ICT transfer imposed by the parent organization. Support was found for the main propositions: Procedural justice significantly predicted successful ICT transfer and adoption, while absorptive capacity was not significant. These findings are consistent even when knowledge tacitness was high. The perceived success of the ICT transfer as well as its adoption varied widely across these firms. The potential reasons for this divergence in effectiveness are manifold, but our findings suggest that in situations of substantial knowledge tacitness, a higher level of procedural justice, rather than a higher level of absorptive capacity, is critical to effective transfer and adoption.

Whose peace? Local ownership and UN peacebuilding

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on the participation of national actors in United Nations peace operations, reflecting what has become a near orthodox commitment to ‘local ownership.’ Advocates of local ownership assert that it: (1) increases the legitimacy of UN peacebuilding efforts; (2) increases the sustainability of peacebuilding activities after the departure of the UN; and (3) increases democratic governance in post-conflict states. While such thinking about local ownership has informed UN peacebuilding policy to a large extent, the UN has, to date, assumed these positive benefits without critically examining the causal mechanisms that allegedly produce them, specifying the conditions under which this correlation holds, or providing convincing evidence for these assertions. Moreover, exactly what local ownership is, what is being owned, and who local ‘owners’ are remain unclear. Indeed a closer examination of ownership’s relation with legitimacy, sustainability, and democratization reveal a plethora of contradictions that imply that local ownership may in fact decrease the UN’s ability to deliver peacekeeping results. Crucially, however, the UN persists in adopting a local ownership approach to peacebuilding, suggesting that it does so because it is normatively appropriate rather than operationally effective.

Soft balancing in the Americas: Latin American opposition to U.S. intervention, 1898–1936

In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, scholars of international relations debated how to best characterize the rising tide of global opposition. The concept of “soft balancing” emerged as an influential, though contested, explanation of a new phenomenon in a unipolar world: states seeking to constrain the ability of the United States to deploy military force by using multinational organizations, international law, and coalition building. Soft balancing can also be observed in regional unipolar systems. Multinational archival research reveals how Argentina, Mexico, and other Latin American countries responded to expanding U.S. power and military assertiveness in the early twentieth century through coordinated diplomatic maneuvering that provides a strong example of soft balancing. Examination of this earlier case makes an empirical contribution to the emerging soft-balancing literature and suggests that soft balancing need not lead to hard balancing or open conflict.

The evolution and heterogeneity of outward foreign direct investment from Latin America

The PhD dissertation investigates the rise of emerging country multinationals (EMNEs), a phenomenon that has opened up a series of research themes and debates. The main debate in this field is the extent to which the theories/frameworks on foreign direct investment (FDI), which have been developed from investigations on multinationals from developed countries, is relevant in explaining outward FDI from EMNEs. This debate is sparked by research suggesting that EMNEs supposedly do not hold the characteristics that are seen as a prerequisite to engaging in FDI. The underlying theme in this PhD is that the field should move away from a one size fit all categorisation of EMNEs, and explore the heterogeneity within EMNEs. Collecting data through various databases, archival articles and annual reports, there was an examination of the internationalisation process of 136 Latin American Multinationals (LAMNEs). The research explores the differences in internationalisation trajectories and global strategies and classifies firms into one of four categories. The four categories that LAMNEs fall into are: Natural-Resource Vertical Integrator, which are firms that are in resource seeking sectors; Accelerated Global, which depict firms that have become global over a very short period of time; Traditional Global, which are EMNEs that have internationalised at the same pace as developed country MNEs and Local Optimisers that only acquire or internationalise to developing countries. The analysis also looks at which decade LAMNEs engaged in FDI, to see if LAMNEs that internationalised during the 1970s and 1980s, during a time when Latin America had a closed economy, was different to LAMNEs that internationalised during the Washington consensus era of the 1990s or to firms that have only just internationalised within the last decade. The findings show that LAMNEs that internationalised before 1990 were more likely to adopt Local Optimiser strategies. However, more LAMNEs that started to internationalise during the 1990s started to adopt Traditional Global strategies, although Local Optimisers were the most prominent strategy. From 2002, there was more prominence of Accelerated Global strategies and a lot more heterogeneity among LAMNEs. Natural-Resource Vertical Integrator LAMNEs, tended to start to internationalisation process during the 1970s/1980s. Despite the rise of EMNEs, and by extension LAMNEs opting to use cross border merger and acquisitions (M&A), there is little research on whether this entry mode has been successful. Contrary to the argument that EMNEs are “internationalising successfully” through this strategy, the findings show that these firms are highly geared and are running less efficiently against their Western competitors. In comparison, LAMNEs internationalising through a more gradual approach, are outperforming their Western competitors on efficiency and are not highly geared- i.e. do not hold a lot of debt. The conclusion of the thesis is the emphasis of moving away from evaluating firms from their country or region of origin, but rather through the global strategy they are using. This will give a more a robust firm level of analysis, and help develop the understanding of EMNEs and international business theory.