"" The World Wars General Knowledge: December 2016
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  • Monday, December 12, 2016

    The Globalization of World Politics

    THE GLOBALIZATION OF WORLD POLITICS
    An Introduction to International Relations

    By John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owen
    By Antony McGrew

    Part I: Foundation of International Relations
    By Tim Dunne and Brian C Schmide
    By Stephen Hobden and Richard Barnett
    By Michael Barnett
    By Christine Sylvester

    Part III Twenty-first-century Challenges
    By Tony Evans and Caroline Thomas
    By Mathew Watson
    By John Vogler
    By Amitav Acharya
    By Jack Donnelly
    By Sheena Chestnut Greitens


    Theresa May on Globalization
    Theresa May's Guildhall Speech Pushing Globalisation
    14 November 2016
    Theresa May gives a first speech on foreign policy.
    She is pushing the Bilderberg's New World Order policy of "globalisation" (worldwide Communism). She pretends to empathise with the people, while she actually despises you. Easy proof - look at her six+ years of failure as home secretary.
    President Obama And Prime Minister Theresa May
    3 September 2016 
    Video
    Full Text/Video
    President Obama Delivers a Statement with Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom.
    Barack Obama: Good morning, everybody. I want to begin by saying what a pleasure it was for me to meet with Prime Minister May and congratulate her on becoming Prime Minister. We've had occasion to be together before in other settings, but this is the first time that I had a chance to address her as Madam Prime Minister. I'm glad that Theresa and I could meet early in her tenure. The Prime Minister continues to be a steadying influence during a time of transition...


    Glossary
    Absolute gains: all states seek to gain more power and influence in the system to secure their national interests. This is absolute gain. Offensive realists are also concerned with increasing power relative to other states. One must have enough power to secure interests and more power than any other state in the system—friend or foe.
    Abuse: states justify self-interested wars by reference to humanitarian principles.
    Agent-structure problem: the problem is how to think about the relationship between agents and structures. One view is that agents are born with already formed identities and interests and then treat other actors and the broad structure that their interactions produce as a constraint on their interests. But this suggests that actors are pre-social to the extent that there is little interest in their identities or possibility that they might change their interests through their interactions with others. Another view is to treat the structure not as a constraint but rather as constituting the actors themselves. Yet this might treat agents as cultural dupes because they are nothing more than artefacts of that structure. The pro­posed solution to the agent-structure problem is to try and find a way to understand how agents and structures constitute each other.
    Anarchic system: the ordering principle’ of inter­national politics according to realism, and that which defines its structure as lacking any central authority. Anarchy: a system operating in the absence of any central government. Does not imply chaos, but in realist theory the absence of political authority. Anti-foundationalist: positions argue that there are never neutral grounds for asserting what is true in any given time or space. Our theories of world define what counts as the facts and so there is no neutral position available to determine between rival claims.
    Apartheid: system of racial segregation introduced in South Africa in 1948, designed to ensure white minority domination.
    Appeasement: a policy of making concessions to a revanchist (or otherwise territorially acquisitive) state in the hope that settlement of more modest claims will assuage that states expansionist appetites. Appeasement remains most (in)famously associated with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlains acquiescence to Hitler’s incursions into Austria and then Czechoslovakia, cul­minating in the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Since then, appeasement has generally been seen as
    synonymous with a craven collapse before the demands of dictators—encouraging, not disarming, their aggres­sive designs.
    Arab Spring: the wave of street protests and demon­strations that began in Tunisia in December 2010, that spread across the Arab world, and that have led to the toppling of governments in a series of countries and to serious challenges to many other regimes.
    ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations): a geopolitical and economic organization of several countries located in South East Asia. Initially formed as a display of solidarity against communism, its aims now have been redefined and broadened to include the acceleration of economic growth and the promotion of regional peace. By 2005 the ASEAN countries had a combined GDP of about $884 billion.
    Asian financial crisis: the severe disruption to the economies of Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia in 1997-8, starting as huge international speculation against the prevailing price of those five countries’ currencies and then spreading to intense balance sheet problems for their banking sectors. Austerity: the name given to the current agenda for bringing public finances back into line through con­certed cuts in public spending.
    Axis of evil: phrase deliberately used by George W. Bush in January 2002 to characterize Iran, North Korea, and Iraq.
    Balance of power: in realist theory, refers to an equi­librium between states; historical realists regard it as the product of diplomacy (contrived balance), whereas structural realists regard the system as having a tendency towards a natural equilibrium (fortuitous balance). It is a doctrine and an arrangement whereby the power of one state (or group of states) is checked by the counter­vailing power of other states.
    Ballistic missile defences: technologies designed to defend a country against attacks that use ballistic missiles. Bandung Conference: a conference held in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, by representatives of twenty-nine African and Asian countries to encourage decoloniza­tion and promote economic and cultural cooperation. The conference is sometimes credited as having led to the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement of 1961. Battle of the sexes: a scenario in game theory illustrat­ing the need for a coordination strategy.
    Battlespace: in the era of aircraft and satellites, the traditional ‘battlefield’ has given way to the three- dimensional battlespace.
    Biopolitics: concept introduced by Foucault—it iden­tifies two forms of intertwined power: the disciplining of the individual body and the regulation of populations. Bond markets: the markets used by national monetary authorities to try to sell government debt in order to facilitate additional levels of public sector spending. Breadwinner: a traditionally masculine role of work­ing in the public sphere for wages and providing for the economic needs of the family.
    Bretton Woods: the regulatory system introduced at the end of the Second World War in an attempt to bring stability to those elements of the world economy under the US sphere of influence. The underlying objective of Bretton Woods was to provide sufficient policy space within domestic economies for governments to inter­vene in the interests of ensuring full employment. Brezhnev doctrine: declaration by Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 that members of the Warsaw Pact would enjoy only ‘limited sovereignty’ in their political development. It was associated with the idea of ‘limited sovereignty’ for Soviet bloc nations, which was used to justify the crushing of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
    BRIC: an acronym (coined by the banking firm Goldman Sachs in 2003) for Brazil, Russia, India, and China—the rising world powers of densely populated countries who have recently come to increased prominence in interna­tional economic affairs due to their high growth rates. Brute facts: exist independently of human agreement and will continue to exist even if humans disappear or deny their existence. Constructivists and poststructuralists disagree as to whether brute facts are socially constructed.
    Bundesbank: the German central bank prior to the move to the third stage of European Economic and Monetary Union and widely perceived to have been the policy tem­plate for the design of the European Central Bank.
    Cairns Group: a group of nineteen agriculture-export­ing countries committed to bringing about further liber­alization of the rules for world agricultural trade.
    Capabilities: the resources that are under an actor’s direct control, such as population or size of territory, resources, economic strength, military capability, and competence (Waltz 1979: 131).
    Capacity building: providing the funds and technical training to allow developing countries to participate in global environmental governance.
    Capital controls: especially associated with the Bretton Woods system, these are formal restrictions on the movement of money from one country to another in an attempt to ensure that finance retains a ‘national’ rather than a ‘global’ character.
    Capitalism: a system of production in which human labour and its products are commodities that are bought and sold in the market-place. In Marxist analysis, the capitalist mode of production involved a specific set of social relations that were particular to a specific historical period. For Marx there were three main char­acteristics of capitalism: (1) Everything involved in pro­duction (e.g. raw materials, machines, labour involved in the creation of commodities, and the commodities themselves) is given an exchange value, and all can be exchanged, one for the other. In essence, under capital­ism everything has its price, including people’s working time. (2) Everything that is needed to undertake produc­tion (i.e. the factories, and the raw materials) is owned by one class—the capitalists. (3) Workers are ‘free’, but in order to survive must sell their labour to the capital­ist class, and because the capitalist class own the means of production, and control the relations of production, they also control the profit that results from the labour of workers.
    Citizenship: the status of having the right to partici­pate in and to be represented in politics.
    Civic nationalism: a nationalism which claims the nation is based on commitment to a common set of political values and institutions.
    Civil and political rights: one of the two principal groups of internationally recognized human rights. They provide legal protections against abuse by the state and seek to ensure political participation for all citizens. Examples include equality before the law, protection against torture, and freedoms of religion, speech, assem­bly, and political participation.
    Civil society: (1) the totality of all individuals and groups in a society who are not acting as participants in any government institutions, or (2) all individuals and groups who are neither participants in government nor acting in the interests of commercial companies. The two meanings are incompatible and contested. There is a third meaning: the network of social insti­tutions and practices (economic relationships, family and kinship groups, religious, and other social affilia­tions) which underlie strictly political institutions. For democratic theorists the voluntary character of these associations is taken to be essential to the workings of democratic politics.
    Clash of civilizations: controversial idea first used by Samuel Huntington in 1993 to describe the main cul­tural fault-line of international conflict in a world with­out communism; the notion has become more popular still since 9/11.
    Class: Groups of people in society who share similar characteristics. Used by Marxists in an economic sense to denote people who share the same relationship to the means of production—in capitalist society the bour­geoisie, which owns the means of production, and the proletariat, which do not own the means of production and in order to subsist must sell their labour. Coexistence: the doctrine of ‘live and let live’ between political communities or states.
    Cold war: extended worldwide conflict between com­munism and capitalism that is normally taken to have begun in 1947 and concluded in 1989 with the collapse of Soviet power in Europe.
    Collaboration: a form of cooperation requiring parties not to defect from a mutually desirable strategy for an individually preferable strategy.
    Collective security: refers to an arrangement where ‘each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to aggression (Roberts and Kingsbury 1993: 30). It is also the foundational principle of the League of Nations: namely, that member states would take a threat or attack on one member as an assault on them all (and on international norms more generally). The League would accordingly respond in unison to such violations of international law. Appreciating that such concerted action would ensue, putative violators—the League’s framers hoped—would be duly deterred from launching aggressive strikes in the first place. As the 1920s and 1930s showed, however, theory and practice diverged wildly, with League members failing to take concerted action against Japanese imperialism in Asia, or German and Italian expansionism in Europe and Africa.
    Combating terrorism: consists of anti-terrorism efforts (measures to protect against or mitigate future terrorist attacks) and counterterrorism efforts (proac­tive actions designed to retaliate against or forestall terrorist actions).
    Common humanity: we all have human rights by vir­tue of our common humanity, and these rights generate correlative moral duties for individuals and states. Community: a human association in which members share common symbols and wish to cooperate to realize common objectives.
    Comparative advantage: David Ricardo’s theory of trade which states that, under free and fair market conditions, all countries stand to benefit by specializing in the production of goods to which they are relatively most suited and then trading their surplus production with one another.
    Compliance: if a state is in compliance it is living up to its obligations under a treaty. Many multilateral environmental agreements have some form of‘monitor­ing and compliance procedures’ to help ensure that this happens.
    Concert: the directorial role played by a number of great powers, based on norms of mutual consent.
    Conditionalities: policy requirements imposed by the IMF or the World Bank—usually with a distinctively neo-liberal character—in return for the disbursement of loans. They are politically controversial insofar as they often nullify domestic electoral mandates. Consequentialist: for consequentialists, it is the likely consequences of an action that should guide decisions. In international ethics, realism and utilitarianism are the most prominent consequentialist ethics.
    Constitutive rules: in contrast to regulative rules, which are rules that regulate already existing activities and thus shape the rules of the game, constitutive rules define the game and its activities, shape the identity and interests of actors, and help define what counts as legiti­mate action.
    Constitutive theories: theories that assume that our theories of the social world help to construct the social world and what we see as the external world. Thus the very concepts we use to think about the world help to make that world what it is. Constitutive theories assume mutually constitutive rather than causal relations among main ‘variables’.
    Constructivism: an approach to international politics that concerns itself with the centrality of ideas and human consciousness and stresses a holistic and idealist view of structures. As constructivists have examined world poli­tics they have been broadly interested in how the struc­ture constructs the actors’ identities and interests, how their interactions are organized and constrained by that structure, and how their very interaction serves to either reproduce or transform that structure.

    Containment: American political strategy for resist­ing perceived Soviet expansion, first publicly espoused by an American diplomat, George Kennan, in 1947. Containment became a powerful factor in American policy towards the Soviet Union for the next forty years, and a self-image of Western policy-makers.
    Convention: a type of general treaty between states, often the result of an international conference. A frame­work convention sets out goals, organizations, scientific research, and review procedures with a view to develop­ing future action to establish and solve environmental problems—in terms of a ‘framework convention-adjust­able protocol’ model.
    Cooperation: is required in any situation where par­ties must act together in order to achieve a mutually acceptable outcome.
    Coordination: a form of cooperation requiring par­ties to pursue a common strategy in order to avoid the mutually undesirable outcome arising from the pursuit of divergent strategies.
    CoP: Conference of the Parties to a convention, usu­ally held annually.
    Cosmopolitan model of democracy: a condition in which international organizations, transnational cor­porations, global markets, and so forth are accountable to the peoples of the world. Associated with David Held, Daniele Archibugi, Mary Kaldor, and others, a cosmopolitan model of democracy requires the fol­lowing: the creation of regional parliaments and the extension of the authority of such regional bodies (like the European Union) which are already in exist­ence; human rights conventions must be entrenched in national parliaments and monitored by a new International Court of Human Rights; the UN must be replaced with a genuinely democratic and accountable global parliament.
    Cosmopolitanism: denoting identification with a com­munity, culture, or idea that transcends borders or partic­ular societies, and implies freedom from local or national conventions/limitations. In the early twenty-first century, the dominant cosmopolitanism was that of globalizing capitalism, which promoted a community and culture that was informed by market economics, a concept of universal human rights, and a relatively liberal social culture. The cosmopolitanism of globalizing capitalism fostered a degree of multiculturalism, although it sought to reconcile particular cultures to a common ground of universal political and economic principles.
    Counterforce strategy: type of nuclear strategy that targets an adversary’s military and nuclear capabilities. Distinct from a countervalue strategy. Counter-proliferation: term used to describe a variety of efforts to obstruct, slow, or roll back nuclear weapons programmes and nuclear proliferation. Counter-restrictionist: international lawyers who argue that there is a legal right of humanitarian
    intervention in both UN Charter law and customary international law.
    Countervalue strategy: type of nuclear strategy that threatens assets that are valuable to an adversary, such as cities with industrial assets and large populations. Distinct from a counterforce strategy.
    Country: a loose general term, which can be used as a synonym for a state. However, it emphasizes the concrete reality of a political community within a geographical boundary. See also the entry for state.
    Credit crunch: a term used to describe the global banking crisis of 2008, which saw the collapse of several banks and consequential global economic downturn. Credit rating agencies: three private sector companies headquartered in New York—Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch’s—who publish credit ratings for any firm or government seeking to sell debt on world bond markets in an attempt to enhance their access to ready cash.
    Critical theory: attempts to challenge the prevailing order by seeking out, analysing, and, where possible, assisting social processes that can potentially lead to emancipatory change.
    Culture: the sum of the norms, practices, traditions and genres produced by a community, including the beliefs and practices that characterize social life and indicate how society should be run. Cultures may be constructed in village or city locations, or across family, clan, ethnic, national, religious, and other networks. Currency markets: otherwise known as, and per­haps strictly speaking more accurately called, foreign exchange markets. They are purely private sector arrangements for buying and selling currencies, with no public sector oversight of the price at which trades are made or the amount of money that is used to make particular trades.
    Decision-making procedures: these identify specific prescriptions for behaviour, the system of voting, for example, which will regularly change as a regime is con­solidated and extended. The rules and procedures gov­erning the GATT, for example, underwent substantial modification during its history. Indeed, the purpose of the successive conferences was to change the rules and decision-making procedures (Krasner 1985: 4-5). Decolonization: processes by which colonies become independent of colonial powers and sovereign as states in their own right.
    Deconstruction: holds that language is constituted by dichotomies, that one side within a dichotomy is superior to the other, and that we should destabilize the hierarchy between inferior and superior terms. Defensive realism: a structural theory of realism that views states as security maximizers.
    Democracy: a system of government in which the views and interests of the population are represented and promoted through the mechanism of free and fair elections to the political institutions of governance.
    Democratic peace: a central plank of liberal interna­tionalist thought, the democratic peace thesis makes two claims: first, liberal polities exhibit restraint in their relations with other liberal polities (the so-called sepa­rate peace), and second are imprudent in relations with authoritarian states. The validity of the democratic peace thesis has been fiercely debated in the IR literature. Deontological: deontological theories are concerned with the nature of human duty or obligation. They pri­oritize questions of the ‘right’ over those of the good. They focus on rules that are always right for everyone to follow, in contrast to rules that might produce a good outcome for an individual, or their society.
    Deregulation: the removal of all regulation so that market forces, not government policy, control economic developments.
    Derivatives contracts: often exceedingly complex, mathematically-oriented financial instruments used only by professional investors, either to insure them­selves against adverse future price movements or, more likely, to place a potentially lucrative bet on advanta­geous future price movements.
    Detente: relaxation of tension between East and West; Soviet-American detente lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, and was characterized by negotiations and nuclear arms control agreements.
    Deterritorialization: a process in which the organiza­tion of social activities is increasingly less constrained by geographical proximity and national territorial bounda­ries. It is accelerated by the technological revolution, and refers to the diminution of influence of territorial places, distances, and boundaries over the way people collectively identify themselves or seek political recogni­tion. This permits an expansion of global civil society but equally an expansion of global criminal or terrorist networks.
    Development, core ideas, and assumptions: in the orthodox view, the possibility of unlimited economic growth in a free market system. Economies would reach a ‘take-off’ point and thereafter wealth would trickle down to those at the bottom. Superiority of the ‘Western model and knowledge. Belief that the process would ultimately benefit everyone. Domination, expectation of nature. In the alternative view, sufficiently inherent value of nature, cultural diversity, and the coir.- munity-controlled commons (water, land, air, forest; Human activity in balance with nature. Self-reliance. Democratic inclusion, participation—for example, voice for marginalized groups such as women or indigenous groups. Local control.
    Diaspora: movement around the world of people who identify themselves racially or through a common eth­nic group or history.
    Diffusion: concerns how ideas, beliefs, habits, and practices spread across a population.
    Diplomacy: in foreign policy it refers to the use of diplomacy as a policy instrument, possibly in associa­tion with other instruments such as economic or mili­tary force, to enable an international actor to achieve its policy objectives. Diplomacy in world politics refers to a communications process between international actors that seeks through negotiation to resolve con­flict short of war. This process has been refined, institu­tionalized, and professionalized over many centuries. Disaggregated state: the tendency for states to become increasingly fragmented actors in global politics as ever, part of the government machine becomes entangled with its foreign counterparts and others in dealing with global issues through proliferating transgovernmental and global policy networks.
    Discourse: a linguistic system that orders statements and concepts. Poststructuralists oppose the distinc­tion between materialism factors and ideas and see the meaning of materiality as constituted through discourse. DissemiNations: a term coined by Homi Bhabha that refers to the movement or engagement of ideas and knowledge across colonial and postcolonial contexts that defy any easy sense that some cultures adhere to only one set of understandings about how life is and should be led.
    Double burden: when women enter the public work­force working for wages, they usually remain responsi­ble for most of the reproductive and caring labour in the private sphere, thus creating a double workload.
    Dual moral standard: in realist theory, the idea that there are two principles or standards of right and wrong: one for the individual citizen and a different one for the state.
    Dual-use technology: technology that is normally used for civilian purposes, but which may also have a military application. As it refers to nuclear technology, it means technology or material that can be used to gener­ate energy or to make a nuclear weapon.
    Ecological footprint: used to demonstrate the load placed upon the earths carrying capacity by individuals or nations. It does this by estimating the area of produc­tive land or aqua-system required to sustain a popula­tion at its specified standard of living.
    Economic, social, and cultural rights: one of the two principal groups of internationally recognized human rights. They guarantee individuals access to essential goods and services and seek to ensure equal social and cultural participation. Examples include rights to food, housing, health care, education, and social insurance.
    Emancipation: the achievement of equal political, economic, and social rights.
    Embedded liberalism: a term attributed to John Ruggie that refers to market processes and corporate activities backed by a web of social and political con­straints and rewards to create a compromise between free trade globally and welfare at home.
    Empire: a distinct type of political entity, which may or may not be a state, possessing both a home territory and foreign territories. It is a disputed concept that some have tried to apply to the United States to describe its international reach, huge capabilities, and vital global role of underwriting world order.
    Endemic warfare: the condition in which warfare is a recurrent feature of the relations between states, not least because they regard it as inevitable.
    English School: academic writers who seek to develop the argument that states in interaction with each other constitute an international society.
    Enlightenment: associated with rationalist thinkers of the eighteenth century. Key ideas (which some would argue remain mottoes for our age) include: secularism, progress, reason, science, knowledge, and freedom. The motto of the Enlightenment is: ‘Sapere aude! Have cour­age to use your own understanding’ (Kant 1991: 54).
    Enrichment: process that separates the non-fissile iso­tope Uranium-238 from the fissile U-235. Enrichment increases the amount of U-235 beyond what is found in nature so that the material can be used for nuclear energy or nuclear weapons.
    Epistemic community: knowledge-based transna­tional communities of experts and policy activists. Epistemology: the assumptions we make about how we can know something.
    Ethic of responsibility: for historical realists, an ethic of responsibility is the limits of ethics in international politics; it involves the weighing up of consequences and the realization that positive outcomes may result from amoral actions.
    Ethnic nationalism: a nationalism which claims the nation is based on common descent, descent which may be indicated through such characteristics as language, history, way of life, or physical appearance. Eurocentrism: a perspective that takes Europe and European values and ideas as central to world history and that focuses on Europe to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
    Europe: a geographical expression that during the course of the cold war came to be identified with Western Europe, but since 1989 has once again come to be associated with the whole of the European continent.
    European Union (EU): the EU was formally created in 1992 following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. However, the origins of the EU can be traced back to 1951 and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, followed in 1957 with a broader customs union (The Treaty of Rome 1958). Originally a grouping of six countries in 1957, ‘Europe’ grew by adding new members in 1973, 1981, and 1986. Since the fall of the planned economies in Eastern Europe in 1989, the EU has grown further and now comprises twenty-seven member states.
    Eurozone debt crisis: the name given to the increasing difficulty experienced from 2010 onwards by a number of members of the euro currency bloc when trying to defend their fiscal position in the face of historically high and escalating debt servicing charges. The worst affected countries to date have been Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, and Ireland. In very shorthand form, it can be thought of as bond markets telling governments to keep a tighter rein on their public spending.
    Existential deterrence: the belief that possession of a single nuclear warhead is sufficient to deter an adversary from attacking.
    Explanatory theories: theories that see the social world as something external to our theories of the social world. On this view, the task of theory is to report on a world that exists independently of the observer and his or her theoretical position. Explanatory theories assume causal relations among main variables.
    Extended deterrence: using the threat of nuclear response to deter an attack on one’s allies (rather than on oneself).
    Extraterritoriality: occurs when one government attempts to exercise its legal authority in the terri­tory of another state. It mainly arises when the US federal government deliberately tries to use domestic law to control the global activities of transnational companies.
    Failed state: this is a state that has collapsed and can­not provide for its citizens without substantial external support and where the government of the state has ceased to exist inside the territorial borders of the state. Feminism: a political project to understand so as to change womens inequality or oppression. For some, aiming to move beyond gender, so that it no longer matters; for others, to validate womens interests, experi­ences, and choices; for others, to work for more equal and inclusive social relations overall.
    Flexible labour: refers to workers who lack job secu­rity, benefits, or the right to unionize. It gives companies more flexibility in hiring and firing their workforce. Forcible humanitarian intervention: military inter­vention which breaches the principle of state sovereignty where the primary purpose is to alleviate the human suf­fering of some or all within a state’s borders.
    Foreign direct investment: the act of preparing money through economic operations in one country for the purpose of making a new investment in another country. This practice of outsourcing production takes place when costs can be lowered in some way by mov­ing at least part of the production process away from the country in which the firm is headquartered.
    Foundationalist: positions assume that all truth claims (about some feature of the world) can be judged objec­tively true or false.
    Fourteen Points: President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of international society, first articulated in January 1918, included the principle of self-determination, the conduct of diplomacy on an open (not secret) basis, and the establishment of an association of nations to provide guarantees of independence and territorial integrity. Wilson’s ideas exerted an important influence on the Paris Peace Conference, though the principle of self-determination was only selectively pursued when it came to American colonial interests.
    Frankfurt School: the group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Frankfurt.
    Fundamentalism: a strict interpretation of a religious- cultural form drawn from particular understandings— often literal—of basic/fundamental scripture, doctrines, and practices. Fundamentalists typically seek to convert or exclude non-believers from their community.
    G20: the Group of Twenty was established in 1999 as a forum in which major advanced and emerging economies discuss global financial and economic mat­ters. Since its inception, it has held annual Finance
    Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meetings, ar.c more recently Summits of Heads of State. G20 Leader; Summits have been held in Washington in 2008, and it London and Pittsburgh in 2009.
    G7: see G8 (Group of Eight).
    G77 (Group of 77): established in 1964 by a group of seventy-seven developing countries in the United Nations. Still in existence, the G77 aims to promote collective economic interests, mutual cooperation for development, and negotiating capacity on all major inter­national economic issues in the United Nations system. G8 (Group of Eight): established in 1975 as the G5 (France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the USA); sub­sequently expanded as the G7 to include Canada and Italy, and since 1998 the G8 to include the Russian Federation. The G8 conducts semi-formal collaboration on world economic problems. Government leaders meet in annual G8 Summits, while finance ministers and/or their leading officials periodically hold other consulta­tions. See further www.g8online.org.
    Game theory: a branch of mathematics which explores strategic interaction.
    GDP: the initials of gross domestic product, which is the monetary value of all goods produced in a country’s economy in a year.
    Gender: what it means to be male or female in a par­ticular place or time; the social construction of sexual difference.
    Gender relations: power relations: the relational con­structions of masculinity and femininity, in which the masculine is usually privileged but which are contested, and changing.
    Gendered division of labour (GDL): the notion of ‘women’s work’, which everywhere includes womens primary responsibility for childcare and housework, and which designates many public and paid forms of work as ‘women’s’ or ‘men’s’ too.
    Genealogy: a history of the present that asks what political practices have formed the present and which alternative understandings and discourses have been marginalized and forgotten.
    General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): the interim measure introduced in 1947 before a permanent institution was established in the form of the World Trade Organization in 1995. It provided a context over a number of negotiating rounds for countries to try to extend bilateral agreements for reducing tariff barriers to trade to multiple third countries.
    Genocide: acts committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in 1948. Geopolitics: suggests that geographical position is a key determinant of the policies a state pursues, especially in relation to its security and strategy, both at global and regional levels.
    Glasnost: policy of greater openness pursued by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985, involving greater toleration of internal dissent and criticism. Global community: a way to organize governance, authority, and identity that breaks with the sovereign state.
    Global environmental governance: usually refers to the corpus of international agreements and organiza­tions but sometimes has a more specialized meaning that stresses governance by private bodies and NGOs.
    Global financial crisis: referring to the increasingly pervasive sense that the whole of the North Atlantic financial system stood in imminent danger of collapse as one bank after another reported irrecoverable losses on failed investments in mortgage-backed securities in 2007 and 2008.
    Global governance: the loose framework of global regulation, both institutional and normative, that con­strains conduct. It has many elements: international organizations and law; transnational organizations and frameworks; elements of global civil society; and shared normative principles.
    Global network: in a general sense, any network that spans the globe and, in a technical sense, digital net­works that allow instant voice and data communication worldwide—the global information highway.
    Global policy networks: complexes which bring together the representatives of governments, international organizations, NGOs, and the corporate sector for the formulation and implementation of global public policy.
    Global politics: the politics of global social relations in which the pursuit of power, interests, order, and justice transcends regions and continents.
    Global polity: the collective structures and processes by which ‘interests are articulated and aggregated, deci­sions are made, values allocated and policies conducted through international or transnational political pro­cesses’ (Ougaard 2004: 5).
    Global responsibility: the idea that states, international institutions, and corporations should take responsibility for issues that do not fall under the rubric of the national interest.
    Global South: an imprecise term that refers both to countries once called Third World and to the movement
    of peoples in the present time, within Third World areas of the world and to advanced industrialized countries.
    Globalism: a growing collective awareness or con­sciousness of the world as a shared social space.
    Globalization: a historical process involving a fun­damental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communi­ties and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents. It is also something of a catch-all phrase often used to describe a single world economy after the collapse of communism, though sometimes employed to define the growing integration of the inter­national capitalist system in the post-war period.
    Globalized state: the notion of a particular kind of state that helps sustain globalization, as well as responding to its pressures. The distinctive feature of this concept is that the state is not ‘in retreat’ but simply behaving differently. Gold Standard: the late nineteenth- and early twenti­eth-century system through which all trading relation­ships were regulated through the movement of gold from importing countries to exporting countries. In theory this was supposed to lead to automatic adjustment in imports and exports, necessarily keeping all countries in trade balance; in practice it did not work this way. Government: used narrowly to refer to the executive governing a country, or more widely to cover the execu­tive, the legislature, the judiciary, the civil service, the armed forces, and the police.
    Great Depression: a byword for the global economic collapse that ensued following the US Wall Street stock- market crash in October 1929. Economic shockwaves soon rippled around a world already densely intercon­nected by webs of trade and foreign direct investment, with the result that the events of October 1929 were felt in countries as distant as Brazil and Japan.
    Great Recession: the popular name given to the signif­icant downturn in world economic output, production, trade, and employment following the global financial crisis which began in earnest in 2007.
    Group rights: rights that are said to belong to groups such as minority nations or indigenous peoples rather than to individuals.
    Harmony of interests: common among nineteenth- century liberals was the idea of a natural order between peoples which had been corrupted by undemocratic state leaders and outdated policies such as the balance of power. If these distortions could be swept away, they believed, we would find that there were no real conflicts between peoples.
    Hegemony: a system regulated by a dominant leader, or political (and/or economic) domination of a region, usually by a superpower. In realist theory, the influence a great power is able to establish on other states in the system; extent of influence ranges from leadership to dominance. It is also power and control exercised by a leading state over other states.
    High politics: the themes highest on the foreign policy agenda, usually assumed by realists to be those of war, security, and military threats and capabilities.
    Holism: the view that structures cannot be decomposed to the individual units and their interactions because structures are more than the sum of their parts and are irreducibly social. The effects of structures, moreover, go beyond merely constraining the actors but also construct them. Constructivism holds that the international struc­ture shapes the identities and interests of the actors. Holocaust: the term used to describe the attempts by the Nazis to murder the Jewish population of Europe. Some 6 million Jewish people were killed, along with a further million, including Soviet prison­ers, gypsies, Poles, communists, gay people, and physi­cally or mentally disabled people. The term is also used to describe an obliteration of humanity or an entire group of people.
    Horizontal proliferation: means an increase in the number of actors who possess nuclear weapons.
    Human development: a capability-oriented approach to development which, in the words of Mahbub ul Haq, seeks to expand the ‘range of things that people can do, and what they can be . . . The most basic capabilities for human development are leading a long and healthy life, being educated and having adequate resources for a decent standard of living ... [and] social and political participation in society.’
    Human security: the security of people, including their physical safety, their economic and social well­being, respect for their dignity, and the protection of their human rights.
    Humanitarian intervention: the principle that the international community has a right/duty to intervene in states which have suffered large-scale loss of life or genocide, whether due to deliberate action by its gov­ernments or because of the collapse of governance. Hybrid identity: a term in postcolonial analysis that refers to the dynamic challenges that individuals face in a world presenting multiple options for establishing identities through a combination of often contentious activities of work, migration, group history, ethnicity, class, race, gender, national affiliation, and empathy.
    Hybrid international organization: an international organization in which both private transnational actors (NGOs, parties, or companies) and governments or gov­ernmental agencies are admitted as members, with each having full rights of participation in policy-making, including the right to vote on the final decisions. They are called hybrids to contrast with the common assump­tion that only intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) exist. In diplomatic practice they are usually included among the INGOs and so they have sometimes been called hybrid INGOs.
    Idealism: holds that ideas have important causal effects on events in international politics, and that ideas can change. Referred to by realists as utopianism since it under­estimates the logic of power politics and the constraints this imposes on political action. Idealism as a substantive theory of international relations is generally associated with the claim that it is possible to create a world of peace. But idealism as a social theory refers to the claim that the most fundamental feature of society is social conscious­ness. Ideas shape how we see ourselves and our interests, the knowledge that we use to categorize and understand the world, the beliefs we have of others, and the possible and impossible solutions to challenges and threats. The emphasis on ideas does not mean a neglect of material forces such as technology and geography. Instead it is to suggest that the meanings and consequences of these material forces are not given by nature but rather driven by human interpretations and understandings. Idealists seek to apply liberal thinking in domestic politics to inter­national relations: in other words, institutionalize the rule of law. This reasoning is known as the domestic analogy. According to idealists in the early twentieth century, there were two principal requirements for a new world order. First: state leaders, intellectuals, and public opinion had to believe that progress was possible. Second: an interna­tional organization had to be created to facilitate peaceful change, disarmament, arbitration, and (where necessary) enforcement. The League of Nations was founded in 1920 but its collective security system failed to prevent the descent into world war in the 1930s.
    Identity: the understanding of the self in relationship to an ‘other’. Identities are social and thus are always formed in relationship to others. Constructivists gener­ally hold that identities shape interests; we cannot know what we want unless we know who we are. But because identities are social and are produced through interac­tions, identities can change.
    Imperialism: the practice of foreign conquest and rule in the context of global relations of hierarchy and subor­dination. It can lead to the establishment of an empire. Individualism: the view that structures can be reduced to the aggregation of individuals and their interactions. International relations theories that ascribe to individu­alism begin with some assumption of the nature of the units and their interests, usually states and the pursuit of power or wealth, and then examine how the broad structure, usually the distribution of power, constrains how states can act and generates certain patterns in international politics. Individualism stands in contrast to holism.
    Influence: the ability of one actor to change the values or the behaviour of another actor.
    Institutional isomorphism: observes that actors and organizations that share the same environment will, over time, begin to resemble each other in their attrib­utes and characteristics.
    Institutionalization: the degree to which networks or patterns of social interaction are formally constituted as organizations with specific purposes.
    Institutions: persistent and having connected sets of rules and practices that prescribe roles, constrain activ­ity, and shape the expectations of actors. Institutions may include organizations, bureaucratic agencies, trea­ties and agreements, and informal practices that states accept as binding. The balance of power in the interna­tional system is an example of an institution. (Adapted from Haas, Keohane, and Levy 1993: 4-5.)
    Integration: a process of ever closer union between states, in a regional or international context. The process often begins with cooperation to solve technical prob­lems, referred to by Mitrany (1943) as ramification. Intellectual property rights: rules that protect the owners of content through copyright, patents, trade marks, and trade secrets.
    Interconnectedness: the interweaving of human lives so that events in one region of the world have an impact on all or most other people.
    Interdependence: a condition where states (or peoples) are affected by decisions taken by others; for example, a decision to raise interest rates in the USA automatically exerts upward pressure on interest rates in other states. Interdependence can be symmetric, i.e. both sets of actors are affected equally, or it can be asymmetric, where the impact varies between actors. A condition where the actions of one state impact on other states (can be strategic interdependence or economic). Realists equate interdependence with vulnerability.
    Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs): an interna­tional organization in which full legal membership is officially solely open to states and the decision-making authority lies with representatives from governments. International community: term used by politicians, the media, and non-governmental actors to refer to the states that make up the world, often in the attempt to make the most powerful ones respond to a problem, war, or crisis.
    International hierarchy: a structure of authority in which states and other international actors are ranked according to their relative power.
    International institutions: organizations such as the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization that have become necessary to man­age regional or global economic, political, and environ­mental matters. See entry for international organization. International law: the formal rules of conduct that states acknowledge or contract between themselves. International Monetary Fund (IMF): an institution of 188 members as of late 2013, providing extensive technical assistance and short-term flows of stabiliza­tion finance to any of those members experiencing temporarily distressed public finances. Since 1978 it has undertaken comprehensive surveillance of the economic performance of individual member states as a precursor to introducing corrective’ programmes for those coun­tries it deems to have followed the wrong policy course. International non-governmental organizations (INGOs): an international organization in which mem­bership is open to transnational actors. There are many different types, with membership from ‘national’ NGOs, local NGOs, companies, political parties, or individual people. A few have other INGOs as members and some have mixed membership structures.
    International order: the normative and the institu­tional pattern in the relationship between states. The ele­ments of this might be thought to include such things as sovereignty, the forms of diplomacy, international law, the role of the great powers, and the codes circumscrib­ing the use of force.
    International organization: any institution with formal procedures and formal membership from three or more countries. The minimum number of countries is set at three rather than two, because multilateral relationships have significantly greater complexity than bilateral rela­tionships. There are three types of international organi­zation: see entries for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and hybrid international organizations.



    International regime: defined by Krasner (1983: 2) as a set of ‘implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ The concept was developed by neo-realists to analyse the paradox—for them—that international cooperation occurs in some issue areas, despite the struggle for power between states. They assume regimes are created and maintained by a dominant state and/ or participation in a regime is the result of a rational cost-benefit calculation by each state. In contrast, pluralists would also stress the independent impact of institu­tions, the importance of leadership, the involvement of transnational NGOs and companies, and processes of cognitive change, such as growing concern about human rights or the environment.
    International society: The concept used to describe a group of sovereign states that recognize, maintain, and develop common norms, rules, and practices that enable them to coexist and cooperate.
    International system: a set of interrelated parts con­nected to form a whole. In realist theory, systems have defining principles such as hierarchy (in domestic poli­tics) and anarchy (in international politics).
    International Trade Organization (ITO): the one nota­ble failure of the Bretton Woods Conference, with the Truman administration in the US refusing to endorse the proposals to establish a multilateral institution to govern trade relations within the Western alliance.
    Internationalization: this term is used to denote high levels of international interaction and interdependence, most commonly with regard to the world economy. The term is often used to distinguish this condition from glo­balization, as the latter implies that there are no longer distinct national economies in a position to interact. Intertextuality: holds that texts form an ‘intertext’, so that all texts refer to other texts, but each text is at the same time unique. Shows that meaning changes as texts are quoted by other texts. Calls attention to silences and taken-for-granted assumptions.
    Intervention: when there is direct involvement within a state by an outside actor to achieve an outcome pre­ferred by the intervening agency without the consent of the host state.
    Intra-firm trade: international trade from one branch of a transnational company to an affiliate of the same company in a different country.
    Islam: a religious faith developed by the Prophet Muhammad which in the contemporary period func­tions as a form of political identity for millions and the inspiration of what some at least now regard as
    the most important ideological opposition to Western modern values.
    Islamic Conference Organization (OIC): the interna­tional body of Muslim states, formed following an arson attack on the A1 Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 1969. The Charter of the OIC was instituted in 1972, and headquarters established in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of 2010, participants included fifty-seven member states as well as a number of observer states and organizations.
    Issue, an: consists of a set of political questions that are seen as being related, because they all invoke the same value conflicts, e.g. the issue of human rights concerns questions that invoke freedom versus order.
    Jihad: in Arabic, jihad simply means struggle. Jihad can refer to a purely internal struggle to be a better Muslim, a struggle to make society more closely align with the teachings of the Koran, or a call to arms to wage war in self-defence of an Islamic community under attack Adding to the confusion are various interpretations of what constitutes ‘attack’ community’, and which meth­ods can be used morally and spiritually for self-defence.
    Justice: fair or morally defensible treatment for indi­viduals, in the light of human rights standards or stand­ards of economic or social well-being.
    Kantian: connected with the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant and especially with his work Perpetual Peace.
    Keynesian economic theory: named after the English economist, John Maynard Keynes, who advised govern­ments in the 1930s to use public spending to aim for full employment.
    Latent nuclear capacity: term that describes a countrv that possesses all the necessary capabilities to construct a nuclear weapon, but which has not done so.
    Law of nations: literal translation of the ancient Roman term ‘jus gentium’. Although today used inter­changeably with the term ‘international law’, or law between nations, its original meaning referred to under­lying legal principles common to all nations. This gave it a strongly normative character, which was enhanced when, in the Middle Ages, it came to be closely linked to the ancient Greek concept of Natural Law. Although it retained something of this earlier meaning in Vattel’s influential eighteenth-century work, The Law of Nations, the strong emphasis on state sovereignty in Vattel’s work may be seen as marking a shift towards the more mod­ern understanding of law between sovereign states.
    Legitimacy: the acceptability of an institution, rule, or political order, either because it has come into being according to some lawful or right process; or because it provides valuable functional benefits; or because it has some innate moral quality; or because it embodies some superior knowledge or technical expertise.
    Liar loans: loans given by banks in the mortgage lend­ing market which provided customers with incentives to deliberately mislead the banks by exaggerating their level of household income in order to qualify for loans to purchase higher-priced houses. No independent veri­fication of household income took place, with bank staff often encouraging customers to bend the truth in the interests of enabling more credit to be sold.
    Liberal rights: the agenda of human rights that is driven largely from a Western perspective and derived from classical liberal positions.
    Liberalism: according to Doyle (1997: 207), liberalism includes the following four claims. First, all citizens are juridically equal and have equal rights to education, access to a free press, and religious toleration. Second, the legislative assembly of the state possesses only the authority invested in it by the people, whose basic rights it is not permitted to abuse. Third, a key dimension of the liberty of the individual is the right to own property including productive forces. Fourth, liberalism contends that the most effective system of economic exchange is one that is largely market-driven and not one that is sub­ordinate to bureaucratic regulation and control, either domestically or internationally.
    Liberalization: describes government policies which reduce the role of the state in the economy such as through the dismantling of trade tariffs and barriers, the deregulation and opening of the financial sector to for­eign investors, and the privatization of state enterprises. Life cycle of norms: is a concept created by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink to distinguish the differ­ent stages of norm evolution—from emergency to cascade to internalization.
    Light industry: industry that requires less capital investment to fund and operate. It is performed with light, rather than heavy, machinery.
    Logic of appropriateness: attributes action to whether it is viewed as legitimate and the right thing to do, irre­spective of the costs and benefits.
    Logic of consequences: attributes action to the antici­pated benefits and costs, mindful that other actors are doing the very same thing.
    Loyalty: an emotional disposition in which people give institutions (or each other) some degree of uncon­ditional support.
    Market failure: results from the inability of the market to produce goods which require collaborative strategies. Market self-regulation: a system in which financial institutions are allowed to regulate themselves solely on the basis of price signals emerging from markets. Those that interpret price signals successfully will make profits and stay in business; those that interpret them poorly will lose money and be forced into bankruptcy.
    The Marshall Plan: the American programme (for­mally known as the European Recovery Program) was introduced by US Secretary of State George Marshall to aid nearly all West European countries to prevent the spread of international communist movements. From 1948 to mid-1952 more than $13 billion was distributed in the form of direct aid, loan guarantees, grants, and necessities from medicine to mules.
    Marxism: the view that the most fundamental feature of society is the organization of material forces. Material forces include natural resources, geography, military power, and technology. To understand how the world works, therefore, requires taking these fundamentals into account. For International Relations scholars, this leads to forms of technological determinism or the dis­tribution of military power for understanding the state’s foreign policy and patterns of international politics. Materialism: see Marxism.
    Meanings: takes us beyond the description of an object, event, or place and inquires into the significance it has for observers.
    Means (or forces) of production: in Marxist theory, these are the elements that combine in the production process. They include labour as well as the tools and technology available during any given historical period.
    Microeconomics: the branch of economics studying the behaviour of the firm in a market setting. Millennium Development Goals: target-based, time- limited commitments in the UN Millennium Declaration 2000 to improve eight areas: poverty and hunger, primary education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, tackling diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, environmental sustainability, and partnership working. MoP: Meeting of the Parties to a protocol. Mortgage-backed securities: mortgage securitization is a process through which financial institutions can take mortgage debt off their balance sheets by selling contracts to other financial institutions based on claims to future household mortgage repayments. These contracts were traded as securities on global financial markets in the early and mid-2000s without any obvi­ous form of public oversight of how much banks were prepared to get themselves in debt by buying them.
    Multilateralism: the tendency for functional aspects of international relations (such as security, trade, or environmental management) to be organized around large numbers of states, or universally, rather than by unilateral state action.
    Multinational corporations (MNCs): companies that have operations in more than one country. They will have their headquarters in just one country (the ‘home’ coun­try) but will either manage production or deliver services in other countries (‘host’ countries). Multinational corpo­rations will outsource elements of their production where overseas locations give them some sort of economic advantage that they cannot secure at home: this might be a labour cost advantage, a tax advantage, an environmen­tal standards advantage, etc. Also used of a company that has affiliates in a foreign country. These may be branches of the parent company, separately incorporated subsidiar­ies, or associates with large minority shareholdings. Multipolarity: a distribution of power among a num­ber (at least three) of major powers or ‘poles’.
    Nation: a group of people who recognize each other as sharing a common identity, with a focus on a homeland. National interest: invoked by realists and state leaders to signify that which is most important to the state— survival being at the top of the list.
    National security: a fundamental value in the foreign policy of states.
    National self-determination: the right of distinct national groups to become states.
    Nationalism: the idea that the world is divided into nations which provide the overriding focus of political identity and loyalty, which in turn demands national self-determination. Nationalism also can refer to this idea in the form of a strong sense of identity (sentiment) or organizations and movements seeking to realize this idea (politics).
    Nation-state: a political community in which the state claims legitimacy on the grounds that it represents the nation. The nation-state would exist if nearly all the mem­bers of a single nation were organized in a single state, without any other national communities being present. Although the term is widely used, no such entities exist. Natural: a word used to describe socially appropriate gender-role behaviour. When behaviour is seen as natu­ral it is hard to change.
    Neoclassical realism: a version of realism that com­bines both structural factors such as the distribution of power and unit-level factors such as the interests of states (status quo or revisionist).
    Neo-colonial: Informal processes that keep former colonies under the power and especially economic influ­ence of former colonial powers and advanced industrial countries.
    Neo-medievalism: a condition in which political power is dispersed between local, national, and supranational institutions, none of which commands supreme loyalty. Neo-neo: shorthand for the research agenda that neo­realists and neo-liberals share.
    Neo-realism: modification of the realist approach, by recognizing that economic resources (in addition to military capabilities) are a basis for exercising influence and also an attempt to make realism ‘more scientific by borrowing models from economics and behavioural social science to explain international politics.
    Network: any structure of communication for indi­viduals and/or organizations to exchange information, share experiences, or discuss political goals and tactics. There is no clear boundary between a network and an NGO. A network is less likely than an NGO to become permanent, to have formal membership, to have identi­fiable leaders, or to engage in collective action.
    New International Economic Order (NIEO): a twenty- five point manifesto presented to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 by the Non- Aligned Movement and the G77. It aimed to restructure the global economy in ways that would help Third World countries develop and improve their position in the world economy. It was adopted by the General Assembly but was not backed by major economic powers.
    9/11: refers specifically to the morning of 11 September 2001 when nineteen men hijacked four domestic flights en route to California which were sub­sequently flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania. There were 2,974 fatalities, not including the nineteen highjackers, fifteen of whom were from Saudi Arabia. The planning and organization for the attack was coor­dinated in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden, the leader of A1 Qaeda. Approximately a month after the attack the United States and its allies launched an attack against Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from power. Non-discrimination: a doctrine of equal treatment between states.
    Non-governmental organization (NGO): any group of people relating to each other regularly in some formal manner and engaging in collective action, provided that the activities are non-commercial, non-violent, and not on behalf of a government. They are often presumed to be altruistic groups or public interest groups, such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, or Greenpeace, but in UN practice they may come from any sector of civil society, including trades unions and faith communities. Non-intervention: the principle that external powers should not intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.
    Non-nuclear weapon states: refers to a state that is party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, meaning it does not possess nuclear weapons.
    Non-state actors: a term widely used to mean any actor that is not a government.
    Norm entrepreneur: a political actor, whether an individual or an organization, that conceptualizes and promotes a new norm, to define an appropriate stand­ard of behaviour for all actors or a defined sub-group of actors in the political system.
    Normative structure: international relations theory traditionally defines structure in material terms, such as the distribution of power, and then treats structure as a constraint on actors. By identifying a normative structure, constructivists are noting how structures also are defined by collectively held ideas such as knowledge, rules, beliefs, and norms that not only constrain actors, but also construct categories of meaning, constitute their identities and interests, and define standards of appro­priate conduct. Critical here is the concept of a norm, a standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity. Actors adhere to norms not only because of benefits and costs for doing so but also because they are related to a sense of self.
    Normative theory: systematic analyses of the ethical, moral, and political principles which either govern or ought to govern the organization or conduct of global politics. The belief that theories should be concerned with what ought to be, rather than merely diagnosing what is. Norm creation refers to the setting of standards in international relations which governments (and other actors) ought to meet.
    Norms: specify general standards of behaviour, and identity the rights and obligations of states. So, in the case of the GATT, the basic norm is that tariffs and non-tariff barriers should be reduced and eventually eliminated. Together, norms and principles define the essential character of a regime and these cannot be changed without transforming the nature of the regime. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): organi­zation established by treaty in April 1949 comprising twelve (later sixteen) countries from Western Europe and North America. The most important aspect of the
    NATO alliance was the American commitment to the defence of Western Europe.
    Nuclear deterrence: concept that involves using nuclear weapons to prevent opponents from taking undesirable actions. Deterrence in general seeks to use the threat of punishment to convince an opponent not to do something; nuclear deterrence operates on the belief that if there is even a small chance that one state taking an action will cause an opponent to respond with nuclear weapons, the state considering that action will be deterred from doing so. Deterrence is generally viewed as an attempt to defend the status quo, whereas compellence refers to the use of threats of punishment to convince an adversary to change the status quo. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: international treaty that forms the foundation of the nuclear non­proliferation regime, opened for signature in 1968. Nuclear opacity: also called nuclear ambiguity, this term describes a country that has never publicly con­firmed that it has nuclear weapons.
    Nuclear posture: term that describes what a state does with its nuclear weapons after developing them. Nuclear posture includes the actual nuclear capa­bilities of a state; the employment doctrine governing how these capabilities will be used, when, and against whom; and the command and control procedures gov­erning the management and use of these capabilities. Nuclear taboo: the idea that a specific international norm has gradually become accepted by the interna­tional community that the use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable in warfare.
    Nuclear weapons-free zone: these are agreements which establish specific environments or geographic regions as nuclear weapons-free, although there may be varying requirements between zones.
    Occupy movement: the umbrella name for a series of non-hierarchically organized protest camps, whose animating ethos in the wake of the global financial cri­sis followed concerns about the increasing concentra­tion of power and wealth in the hands of an unelected global elite.
    Offensive realism: a structural theory of realism that views states as security maximizers.
    Ontology: the assumptions we make about what exists. Open war economy: a war which is sustained, not by the combatants’ primary reliance on their own indus­trial production, as in the Second World War, but rather by their integration into the world economy, particularly its international criminal dimension.
    Order: this may denote any regular or discernible pat­tern of relationships that are stable over time, or may additionally refer to a condition that allows certain goals to be achieved.
    Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC): created in 1960 by the major oil-producing countries of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, and later expanded in membership to include states like Nigeria, Mexico, and Libya, to coor­dinate oil-production policies in the interest of market stability and profit for producers.
    Orientalism: Western interpretations of the institu­tions, cultures, arts, and social life of countries of the East and Middle East. The subject of a major study by Edward Said, Orientalism is associated today with ste­reotyping and prejudice, often against Islamic societies. Ostpolitik: the West German governments ‘Eastern Policy’ of the mid-to-late 1960s, designed to develop relations between West Germany and members of the Warsaw Pact.
    Paradigm: theories that share ontological and episte- mological assumptions form a paradigm.
    Patriarchy: a persistent society-wide structure within which gender relations are defined by male dominance and female subordination.
    Peace enforcement: designed to bring hostile parties to agreement, which may occur without the consent of the parties.
    Peace of Westphalia: see Treaties of Westphalia. Peaceful coexistence: the minimal basis for orderly relations between states even when they are in conten­tion with each other, as in the cold war period. Peacekeeping: the deployment of a UN presence in the field with the consent of all parties (this refers to classical peacekeeping).
    Perestroika: policy of restructuring, pursued by for­mer Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, in tandem with glasnost, and intended to modernize the Soviet political and economic system.
    Pluralism: an umbrella term, borrowed from American political science, used to signify International Relations theorists who rejected the realist view of the primacy of the state, the priority of national security, and the assumption that states are unitary actors. It is the theoretical approach that considers all organized groups as being potential political actors and analyses the processes by which actors mobilize support to achieve policy goals. Pluralists can accept that transnational actors and international organizations may influence
    governments. Equated by some writers with liberalism, but pluralists reject any such link, denying that theory necessarily has a normative component, and holding that liberals are still highly state-centric.
    Pluralist international society theory: states are conscious of sharing common interests and common values, but these are limited to norms of sovereignty and non-intervention.
    Policy domain: consists of a set of political questions that have to be decided together because they are linked by the political processes in an international organiza­tion, e.g. financial policy is resolved in the IME A policy domain may cover several issues: financial policy includes development, the environment, and gender issues.
    Political community: a community that wishes to gov­ern itself and to be free from alien rule.
    Popular culture: those genres and forms of expression that are mass-consumed, including music, film, televi­sion, and video games. Popular culture is usually seen as less refined than ‘high culture’. The definition of‘high’ and ‘low’/‘popular’ culture changes across time and space. Postcolonial: contemporary international and trans­national relations of race, migration, ethnicity, culture, knowledge, power, and identity.
    Post-colonial: the study of the interactions between European states and the societies they colonized in the modern period.
    Postmodern or 'new' terrorism: groups and indi­viduals with millennial and apocalyptic ideologies with system-level goals. Most value destruction for its own sake, unlike most terrorists in the past who had specific goals usually tied to a territory.
    Post-2008 financial and economic crisis: the period beginning in 2008 that brought global and economic decline and recession affecting the entire world economy. Post-Westphalian: an order in which national bor­ders, and the principle of sovereignty, are no longer paramount.
    Post-Westphalian war: intra-state warfare, typical in the post-cold war period, that is aimed neither at the sovereignty of an enemy state, nor at seizing control of the state apparatus of the country in which it is being waged.
    Poverty: in the orthodox view, a situation suffered by people who do not have the money to buy food and sat­isfy other basic material needs. In the alternative view, a situation suffered by people who are not able to meet their material and non-material needs through their own effort.



    Power: in the most general sense, the ability of a politi­cal actor to achieve its goals. In the realist approach, it is assumed that possession of capabilities will result in influ­ence, so the single word, power, is often used ambiguously to cover both. In the pluralist approach, it is assumed that political interactions can modify the translation of capabilities into influence and therefore it is important to distinguish between the two. Power is defined by most realists in terms of the important resources such as size of armed forces, gross national product, and population that a state possesses. There is the implicit belief that mate­rial resources translate into influence. Poststructuralists understand power as productive, that is as referring to the constitution of subjectivity in discourse. Knowledge is interwoven with power.
    Predatory lending: a type of lending which came to prominence in the investigations into the sub-prime cri­sis, through which loans are made even if the issuer can be fairly certain that the person taking the loan does not have the financial wherewithal to pay it off according to the agreed repayment schedule.
    Primordialism: the belief that certain human or social characteristics, such as ethnicity, are deeply embedded in historical conditions.
    Principles: in regime theory, they are represented by coherent bodies of theoretical statements about how the world works. The GATT operated on the basis of liberal principles which assert that global welfare will be maxi­mized by free trade.
    Prisoner's dilemma: a scenario in game theory illus­trating the need for a collaboration strategy. Programmes and Funds: activities of the UN which are subject to the supervision of the General Assembly and which depend upon voluntary funding by states and other donors.
    Protection myth: a popular assumption that male heroes fight wars to protect the vulnerable, primarily women and children. It is used as a justification for states’ national security policies, particularly in times of war.
    Public bads: the negative consequences which can arise when actors fail to collaborate.
    Public goods: goods which can only be produced by a collective decision, and which cannot, therefore, be produced in the market-place.
    Quasi-state: a state which has ‘negative sovereignty’ because other states respect its sovereign independence but lacks ‘positive sovereignty’ because it does not have the resources or the will to satisfy the needs of its people.
    Rapprochement: re-establishment of more friendly relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States in the early 1970s.
    Rational choice: an approach that emphasizes how actors attempt to maximize their interests, how they attempt to select the most efficient means to achieve those interests, and attempts to explain collective out­comes by virtue of the attempt by actors to maximize their preferences under a set of constraints. Deriving largely from economic theorizing, the rational choice to politics and international politics has been immensely influential and applied to a range of issues.
    Rationality: reflected in the ability of individuals to place their preferences in rank order and choose the best available preference.
    Realism: the theoretical approach that analyses all international relations as the relation of states engaged in the pursuit of power. Realism cannot accommodate non-state actors within its analysis.
    Reason of state: the practical application of the doc­trine of realism and virtually synonymous with it.
    Reciprocity: reflects a ‘tit for tat’ strategy, only cooper­ating if others do likewise.
    Regime: see also international regime. These are sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations. They are social institutions that are based on agreed rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures. These govern the interactions of various state and non-state actors in issue-areas such as the envi­ronment or human rights. The global market in coffee, for example, is governed by a variety of treaties, trade agreements, scientific and research protocols, market protocols, and the interests of producers, consumers, and distributors. States organize these interests and consider the practices, rules, and procedures to create a governing arrangement or regime that controls the production of coffee, monitors its distribution, and ulti­mately determines the price for consumers. (Adapted from Young 1997: 6.)
    Regional trading agreement: the act of geographically-contiguous countries endorsing in law the desire to introduce a single trade policy across all participating states, ranging from a simple customs union designed to bring existing tariff levels closer into line to a genuinely free trade area whose objective is to completely abolish all tariffs between members.
    Regionalism: development of institutionalized coop­eration among states and other actors on the basis of regional contiguity as a feature of the international system.
    Regionalization: growing interdependence between geographically contiguous states, as in the European Union.
    Regulative rules: in contrast to constitutive rules, which define the game and its activities, shape the iden­tity and interests of actors, and help define what counts as legitimate action, regulative rules regulate already existing activities and thus shape the rules of the game. Regulatory arbitrage: in the world of banking, the process of moving funds or business activity from one country to another, in order to increase profits by escap­ing the constraints imposed by government regulations. By analogy the term can be applied to any transfer of economic activity by any company in response to gov­ernment policy.
    Relations of production: in Marxist theory, relations of production link and organize the means of production in the production process. They involve both the technical and institutional relationships necessary to allow the pro­duction process to proceed, as well as the broader struc­tures that govern the control of the means of production, and control of the end product(s) of that process. Private property and wage labour are two of the key features of the relations of production in capitalist society.
    Relative gains: one of the factors that realists argue constrain the willingness of states to cooperate. States are less concerned about whether everyone benefits (absolute gains) and more concerned about whether someone may benefit more than someone else.
    Reprocessing: process that separates fissionable plu­tonium from non-fissile material in spent nuclear fuel, typically for use in a nuclear weapon.
    Responsibility to protect: states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens, but when they are unable or unwilling to do so this responsibility is transferred to the society of states.
    Restrictionists: international lawyers who argue that humanitarian intervention violates Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and is illegal under both UN Charter law and customary international law.
    Revisionism: the desire to re-make or to revise the dominant rules and norms of an international order, in contrast to those states that seek to maintain the status quo.
    Revolution in military affairs: describes a radical change in the conduct of warfare. This may be driven by technology, but may also result from organizational, doctrinal, or other developments. When the change is of several orders of magnitude, and impacts deeply on wider society, the term ‘military revolution’ is used to describe it.
    Rimland: refers to those geographical areas on the periphery of continents and major oceans, control of which is said to confer major strategic advantage.
    Robin Hood tax: a proposed series of financial trans­actions taxes for the purpose of funding global good causes, to be levied at an extremely small rate but still being capable of raising large sums of money given the vast daily turnover of trading on global financial markets. Rules: operate at a lower level of generality to princi­ples and norms, and they are often designed to reconcile conflicts which may exist between the principles and norms. Third World states, for example, wanted rules which differentiated between developed and underde­veloped countries.
    Second cold war: period of East-West tension in the 1980s, compared to the early period of confrontation between 1946 and 1953.
    Security: in finance, a contract with a claim to future payments in which (in contrast to bank credits) there is a direct and formally identified relationship between the investor and the borrower; also unlike bank loans, securities are traded in markets.
    Security community: ‘A group of people which has become “integrated”. By integration we mean the attain­ment, within a territory, of a “sense of community” and of institutions and practices strong enough and wide­spread enough to assure ... dependable expectations of “peaceful change” among its population. By a “sense of community” we mean a belief . . . that common social problems must and can be resolved by processes of “peaceful change’” (Karl Deutsch et al. 1957).
    Security regimes: these occur ‘when a group of states cooperate to manage their disputes and avoid war by seeking to mute the security dilemma both by their own actions and by their assumptions about the behaviour of others’ (Robert Jervis 1983b).
    Selectivity: an agreed moral principle is at stake in more than one situation, but national interest dictates a divergence of response.
    Self-determination: a principle ardently, but selec­tively, espoused by US President Woodrow Wilson in the peacemaking that followed the First World War: namely that each ‘people’ should enjoy self-government over its own sovereign nation-state. Wilson pressed for application of this principle to East/Central Europe, but did not believe that other nationalities (in colonized Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and Caribbean) were fit for self-rule.
    Self-help: in realist theory, in an anarchical environ­ment, states cannot assume other states will come to their defence even if they are allies. Each state must take care of itself.
    11 September 2001 (9/11): the day when four aircraft were hijacked by Islamic terrorists in the United States— two of which destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, one partially destroyed the Pentagon, and a fourth crash-landed in a field in Pennsylvania (see also 9/11). Sexual relations/power relations: the relational construction of heterosexuality and homosexuality, in which the heterosexual is usually privileged.
    Shadow of the future: a metaphor indicating that decision-makers are conscious of the future when mak­ing decisions.
    Sinatra doctrine: statement by the Soviet foreign min­istry in October 1989 that countries of Eastern Europe were ‘doing it their way’ (a reference to Frank Sinatra’s song ‘I did it my way’) and which marked the end of the Brezhnev doctrine and Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.
    Single Undertaking: under WTO rules, there is a requirement for members to accept or reject the out­come of multiple multilateral negotiations as one pack­age of reforms, rather than only choosing those parts with which they are most happy.
    Skyjacking: the takeover of a commercial aeroplane for the purpose of seizing hostages and using the hos­tages to publicize a grievance or bargain for a particular political or economic goal.
    Social construction of reality: suggests that reality is a product of human action, interaction, and knowledge. Actors and organizations will interact and develop shared ideas about what exists ‘out there’, and, once they have agreement about these concepts, this knowledge helps to form their understanding of the world.
    Social facts: dependent on human agreement, their existence shapes how we categorize the world and what we do.
    Social movement: people with a diffuse sense of col­lective identity, solidarity, and common purpose that usually leads to collective political behaviour. The con­cept covers all the different NGOs and networks, plus all their members and all the other individuals who share the common value(s). Thus, the women’s movement and the environmental movement are much more than the specific NGOs that provide leadership and focus the desire for social change.
    Society of states: an association of sovereign states based on their common interests, values, and norms. Soft power: a term coined by the US academic Joseph Nye to highlight the importance in world politics of persuasion, attraction, and emulation, getting people to agree with you rather than trying to force them to do what you want through coercive or military power. Solidarism: a view that the international society of states is capable of acting together (in solidarity) to uphold or defend shared values. International society is not merely a framework of coexistence but an agent for change and humanitarianism.
    Sovereign equality: the technical legal equality pos­sessed by sovereign states as expressed in UN General Assembly votes.
    Sovereignty: the principle that within its territorial boundaries the state is the supreme political authority, and that outside those boundaries the state recognizes no higher political authority.
    Specialized agencies: international institutions which have a special relationship with the central system of the United Nations but which are constitutionally inde­pendent, having their own assessed budgets, executive heads and committees, and assemblies of the representa­tives of all state members.
    Stability-instability paradox: the belief that stability at the level of nuclear war will lead to instability at lower levels of conflict. Nuclear-armed adversaries may feel emboldened to launch low-level conventional attacks if they believe their nuclear weapons will protect them from retaliation.
    Stagflation: a situation experienced by many of the world’s most advanced industrialized countries in the 1970s, where a period of very limited or even no growth was accompanied by seemingly runaway price increases. The word is a compound of ‘stagnation (indicating the no-growth scenario) and ‘inflation (indicating the large increases in the general price level).
    State: the one word is used to refer to three distinct concepts. (1) In international law, a state is an entity that is recognized to exist when a government is in control of a population residing within a defined territory. It is comparable to the idea in domestic law of a company being a legal person. Such entities are seen as possess­ing sovereignty that is recognized by other states in the international system. (2) In the study of international politics, each state is a country. It is a community of people who interact in the same political system. (3) In philosophy and sociology, the state consists of the apparatus of government, in its broadest sense, covering the executive, the legislature, the administration, the judiciary, the armed forces, and the police. For Weber, the essential domestic feature of a state was a monopoly over the legitimate use of force.
    State autonomy: in a more interdependent world, simply to achieve domestic objectives national govern­ments are forced to engage in extensive multilateral collaboration and cooperation. But in becoming more embedded in frameworks of global and regional gov­ernance states confront a real dilemma: in return for more effective public policy and meeting their citizens’ demands, whether in relation to the drugs trade or employment, their capacity for self-governance—that is state autonomy—is compromised.
    State capitalism: an economic system in which state authorities have a financial stake, and degrees of actual control, over the means of production and exchange. State of war: the conditions (often described by clas­sical realists) where there is no actual conflict, but a permanent cold war that could become a ‘hot’ war at any time.
    State sovereignty: a principle for organizing politi­cal space where there is one sovereign authority which governs a given territory. The Treaties of Westphalia are usually defined as the birth of state sovereignty, although it took several hundred years before the principle was fully institutionalized. International Relations theories hold different views of whether state sovereignty has been transformed or even eroded. They also disagree as to whether state sovereignty is a good way of organizing political community, that is state sovereignty’s norma­tive status.
    State system: the regular patterns of interaction between states, but without implying any shared values between them. This is distinguished from the view of a ‘society’ of states.
    Stateless: individuals who do not ‘belong’ to any state and therefore do not have passports or rights. State-sponsored terrorism: exists when individual states provide support to terrorist groups including fund­ing, training, and resources, including weapons. Claims of state sponsorship of terrorism are difficult to prove. States go to great lengths to ensure that their involvement is as clandestine as possible so that their leaders have a degree of plausible deniability when they respond to such charges. Other claims of state sponsorship are a matter of subjective opinion. In other cases the term confuses ‘state terror’ (the use of violence by the state to keep its own citizenry fearful, or the original connotation of terrorism) with state-sponsored terrorism.
    Statism: in realist theory, the ideology that supports the organization of humankind into particular com­munities; the values and beliefs of that community are protected and sustained by the state.
    Structure: in the philosophy of the social sciences a structure is something that exists independently of the actor (e.g. social class) but is an important determinant in the nature of the action (e.g. revolution). For contem­porary structural realists, the number of great powers in the international system constitutes the structure.
    Subaltern: social groups at the lowest levels of eco­nomic power and esteem who are often excluded from political participation, such as peasants or women. Subaltern Studies, which developed first in India, focuses on the history and culture of subaltern groups. Sub-prime crisis: the popular expression for the 2007 rupture in mortgage lending markets which exposed banks to bad debts and resulted in a global credit crunch. Subsistence: work necessary for basic family survival, such as food production, for which the worker does not receive wages.
    Summit diplomacy: refers to a direct meeting between heads of government (of the superpowers in particular) to resolve major problems. The ‘summit’ became a regu­lar mode of contact during the cold war.
    Superpower: term used to describe the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945, denoting their global political involvements and military capabilities, includ­ing in particular their nuclear arsenals. Supranationalism: concept in integration theory that implies the creation of common institutions having independent decision-making authority and thus the ability to impose certain decisions and rules on member states.
    Survival: the first priority for state leaders, emphasized by historical realists such as Machiavelli, Meinecke, and Weber.
    Sustainable development: this has been defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
    Tariff: a monetary levy taking the form of a tax and placed on a product by an importing country at the point at which it enters the country, or by an exporting country at the point at which it leaves the country.
    Tax avoidance: a large global business through which complex accounting practices are undertaken to move money offshore and to place it specifically in a tax-free jurisdiction.
    Technological revolution: refers to the way modern communications (the Internet, satellite communica­tions, high-tech computers) made possible by techno­logical advances have made distance and location less important factors not just for government (including at local and regional levels) but equally in the calculations of other actors such as firms’ investment decisions or in the activities of social movements.
    Territorial state: a state that has power over the popu­lation which resides on its territory but which does not seek to represent the nation or the people as a whole. Territoriality: borders and territory still remain important, not least for administrative purposes. Under conditions of globalization, however, a new geography of political organization and political power is emerging which transcends territories and borders.
    Territory: a portion of the earths surface appropriated by a political community, or state.
    Terrorism: the use of illegitimate violence by sub­state groups to inspire fear, by attacking civilians and/ or symbolic targets. This is done for purposes such as drawing widespread attention to a grievance, provoking a severe response, or wearing down their opponent’s moral resolve, to affect political change. Determining when the use of violence is legitimate, which is based on contextual morality of the act as opposed to its effects, is the source for disagreement over what constitutes terrorism.
    The end of history: famous phrase employed by Francis Fukuyama in 1989; this argued that one phase of history shaped by the antagonism between collectivism and indi­vidualism had (200 years after the French Revolution) come to an end, leaving liberalism triumphant.
    Third World: a notion that was first used in the late 1950s to define both the underdeveloped world and the political and economic project that would help overcome underde­velopment: employed less in the post-cold war era. Time-space compression: the technologically induced erosion of distance and time giving the appearance of a world that is, in communication terms, shrinking.
    Total war: a term given to the twentieth century’s two world wars to denote not only their global scale but also the combatants’ pursuit of their opponents’ ‘uncondi­tional surrender’ (a phrase particularly associated with the Western allies in the Second World War). Total war also signifies the mobilization of whole populations— including women into factory work, auxiliary civil defence units, and as paramilitaries and paramedics—as part of the total call-up of all able-bodied citizens in pursuit of victory.
    Toxic assets: the name popularly given to the failed investments that most Western banks made in mort­gage-backed securities in the lead-up to the sub-prime crisis. An important part of the government bailouts that were enacted in many advanced industrialized countries in 2008 and 2009 was an attempt to use public money in order to take the toxic assets off the balance sheets of banks. Western banks had bought large stocks of mortgage-backed securities at often high prices, but when the market for trading these securities completely evaporated in 2008 it revealed huge losses for the banks and irrecoverable short-term debts. Governments typically chose to use the bailouts in order to replace the essentially worthless toxic assets on banks’ balance sheets with other assets that contin­ued to have high prices, thus saving the banks from bankruptcy.
    Transfer price: the price set by a transnational com­pany for intra-firm trade of goods or services. For accounting purposes, a price must be set for exports, but it need not be related to any market price.
    Transition: usually taken to mean the lengthy period between the end of communist planning in the Soviet bloc and the final emergence of a fully functioning democratic capitalist system.
    Transnational actor: any civil society actor from one country that has relations with any actor from another country or with an international organization. Transnational civil society: a political arena in which citizens and private interests collaborate across borders to advance their mutual goals or to bring governments and the formal institutions of global governance to account for their activities.
    Transnational company/corporation (TNC): see mul­tinational corporations (MNCs).
    Treaties of Westphalia 1648: the Treaties of Osnabruck and Munster, which together form the ‘Peace of Westphalia’, ended the Thirty Years’ War and were crucial in delimiting the political rights and authority of European monarchs. Among other things, the Treaties granted monarchs rights to maintain standing armies, build fortifications, and levy taxes.
    Triads: the three economic groupings (North America, Europe, and East Asia).
    Triangulation: occurs when trade between two coun­tries is routed indirectly via a third country. For example, in the early 1980s, neither the Argentine Government nor the British Government permitted trade between the two countries, but companies simply sent their exports via Brazil or Western Europe.
    Tribal: community defined through family relations or as living in the same local space, usually applied to the non-Western world. When used as a non-academic term it often has the connotations of something that is pre-modern, underdeveloped, and inferior to Western societies.
    Tricontinental Conference: a follow-up meeting to the Bandung Conference in 1966 that was held in Havana, Cuba. Five hundred delegates from independent and decolonizing states of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa attended. The Conference produced more radical proposals for achieving decolonization and non-aligned power, such as armed struggle.
    Truman doctrine: statement made by US President Harry Truman in March 1947 that it ‘must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. Intended to persuade Congress to support limited aid to Turkey and Greece, the doc­trine came to underpin the policy of containment and American economic and political support for its allies.
    Tyrannical states: states where the sovereign govern­ment is massively abusing the human rights of its citi­zens, engaging in acts of mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and/or genocide.
    Uneven globalization: describes the way in which contemporary globalization is unequally experienced across the world and among different social groups in such a way that it produces a distinctive geography of inclusion in, and exclusion from, the global system. Unilateral humanitarian intervention: military inter­vention for humanitarian purposes which is undertaken without the express authorization of the United Nations Security Council.
    Unipolarity: a distribution of power internationally in which there is clearly only one dominant power or ‘pole’. Some analysts argue that the international system became unipolar in the 1990s since there was no longer any rival to American power.
    United Nations Charter (1945): the Charter of the United Nations is the legal regime that created the United Nations as the world’s only ‘supranational’ organization. The Charter defines the structure of the United Nations, the powers of its constitutive organs, and the rights and obligations of sovereign states party to the Charter. Among other things, the Charter is the key legal document limiting the use of force to instances of self-defence and collective peace enforcement
    endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. See also specialized agencies.
    Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The principal normative document of the global human rights regime. Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, it provides a comprehensive list of interdependent and indivisible human rights that are accepted as authoritative by most states and other inter­national actors.
    Utilitarianism: utilitarians follow Jeremy Bentham’s claim that action should be directed towards producing the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. In more recent years the emphasis has been not on happiness, but on welfare or general benefit (happiness being too difficult to achieve). There are also differences between act and rule utilitarians. Act utilitarianism focuses on the impact of actions whereas rule utilitarianism refers to the utility maximization following from universal conformity with a rule or set of rules.
    Versailles Peace Treaty: the Treaty of Versailles for­mally ended the First World War (1914-18). The Treaty established the League of Nations, specified the rights and obligations of the victorious and defeated pow­ers (including the notorious regime of reparations on Germany), and created the ‘Mandatories’ system under which ‘advanced nations’ were given legal tutelage over colonial peoples.
    Vertical proliferation: refers to the increase in the number of nuclear weapons by those states already in possession of such weapons.
    Volcker Rule: named after Paul Volcker, President Obama’s Chair of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board until January 2011, a proposal to formally split private financial institutions into purely commercial and purely investment banks as a means of ring-fencing a small number of practices associated specifically with deposit-taking which alone might benefit from future Federal Reserve lender of last resort facilities.
    War on terror: an umbrella term coined by the Bush administration which refers to the various military, political, and legal actions taken by the!USA and its allies after the attacks on 11 September 2001 to curb the spread of terrorism in general but Islamic-inspired ter­rorism in particular.
    Warsaw Pact: the Warsaw Pact was created in May 1955 in response to West Germany’s rearmament and entry into NATO. It comprised the USSR and seven communist states (though Albania withdrew support in 1961). The organization was officially dissolved in July 1991. Washington Consensus: the belief of key opinion- formers in Washington that global welfare would be maximized by the universal application of neoclassical economic policies which favour a minimalist state and an enhanced role for the market.
    Weapons-grade uranium: uranium that has been enriched to more than 90 per cent U-235.
    Weapons of mass destruction: a category defined by the United Nations in 1948 to include ‘atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which have characteristics comparable in destructive effects to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above’.
    World Bank Group: a collection of five agencies under the more general rubric of the World Bank, with head­quarters in Washington, DC. Its formal objective is to encourage development in low- and medium-income countries with project loans and various advisory ser­vices. See further www.worldbank.org.
    World government: associated in particular with those idealists who believe that peace can never be achieved in a world divided into separate sovereign states. Just as governments abolished the state of nature in civil society, the establishment of a world government must end the state of war in international society.
    World order: this is a wider category of order than the ‘international’. It takes as its units of order, not states, but individual human beings, and assesses the degree of order on the basis of the delivery of certain kinds of goods (be it security, human rights, basic needs, or justice) for humanity as a whole.
    World Social Forum: an annual gathering of civil soci­ety groups and anti-globalization organizations that met for the first time in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001.
    World Trade Organization (WTO): established in 1995 with headquarters in Geneva, with 159 members as of late 2013. It is a permanent institution covering services, intellectual property and investment issues as well as pure merchandise trade, and it has a disputes settlement mechanism in order to enforce its free trade agenda. World-travelling: a postcolonial methodology that aims to achieve some mutual understanding between people of different cultures and points of view by find­ing empathetic ways to enter into the spirit of a different experience and find in it an echo of some part of oneself.