Propuesta de eliminación del requisito de visado de la Unión Europea para los ciudadanos ecuatorianos: escenarios y estrategias (Coyuntura)

En este artículo se analiza la evolución histórica de los flujos migratorios entre Ecuador y Europa. Se observa una nueva migración europea hacia Ecuador y otros países suramericanos, pese a lo cual la Unión Europea no ha adaptado su política migratoria a esta nueva realidad. Por tanto, se plantea la necesidad de que la UE elimine el requisito de visado a los ciudadanos ecuatorianos. Se presentan escenarios así como estrategias para lograr ese objetivo, incluida una propuesta de solidaridad y acción colectiva de UNASUR en materia de visados.

América Latina y Europa ante los cambios globales (Tema Central)

El artículo se refiere a los cambios globales que se han dado en el sistema internacional cuyo resultado ha sido el debilitamiento de la gobernanza global. En esta lógica, el autor argumenta que las relaciones de poder han provocado un cambio en los conceptos tradicionales de las Ciencias Sociales y las Relaciones Internacionales, especialmente los relacionados al tiempo y espacio que en la actualidad son globales y simultáneos. Finalmente concluye que varias tendencias afectarán a América Latina y a la Unión Europea en cuanto a la globalización, la paz, el afianzamiento del sistema democrático, la diplomacia de cumbres, la cooperación y al poder como elemento cambiante.

Algunas características de los programas antárticos de India y China (Tema Central)

This paper states that even though the Antarctic Treaty is a remarkable instrument for peaceful collaboration and scientific research, it is, basically, a by-product of the Cold War that reaffirms a particular status quo. This paper explores whether the ATS will meet the needs of an emerging world order. Particularly, the paper evaluates the ATS in the face of new global challenges, both internal and external to the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) itself, as well as power shifting processes on a world scale, climate change and the changing interests of new states. China is a key component in understanding this issue because its Antarctic engagement is entering a new phase one that challenges current multilateral provisions. China’s Antarctic program will be analyzed within the framework of International Relations approaches and theories.

Feminism and IR and the Conditions for Critical Dialogue

My objective in this paper is to problematize the call for dialogue and engagement between feminists and non-feminist International Relations (IR) scholars. I will concentrate on two pieces of scholarship to discuss the issue of dialogue: first, Robert Keohane’s “Beyond Dychotomies: Conversations between International Relations and Feminist Theory’s” (Keohane, 1998); and second, Anne Tickner’s (1997) “You Just don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists.” In both pieces the question of dialogue is of most importance.

Terrorism: Arriving at an understanding of a term

157-93 (Michael J. Glennon and Serge Sur eds.,

Eternal peace, perpetual war? A critical investigation into Kant's conceptualisations of war

Most discussions of Immanuel Kant's political theory of international politics focus on his work on Eternal Peace and its normative and empirical relevance for contemporary international relations and international law. Yet for all his concern with peace, Kant's work is characterised by a fascinating preoccupation with the concept of war and its role in human history. The purpose of this essay is to investigate critically Kant's different conceptualisations of war and to evaluate his writing as a critique against contemporary versions of Liberal war and peace, as well as recent attempts to reduce war to an immanent logic of biopolitics.

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.