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
SylvesterPart 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.
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.
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.
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.
