Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

/pdf/international-norm-dynamics-and-political-change-37ig9r9dlq.pdf

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

The history of international political orders is written in terms of continuity and change in domestic and international political relations. As a step toward understanding such continuity and change, we explore some ideas drawn from an institutional perspective. An institutional perspective is characterized in terms of two grand issues that divide students of international relations and other organized systems. The first issue concerns the basic logic of action by which human behavior is shaped. On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and a sense of identity. The second issue concerns the efficiency of history. On the one side are those who see history as efficient in the sense that it follows a course leading to a unique equilibrium dictated by exogenously determined interests, identities, and resources. On the other side are those who see history as inefficient in the sense that it follows a meandering, path-dependent course distinguished by multiple equilibria and endogenous transformations of interests, identities, and resources. We argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule- and identity-based action and inefficient histories. We illustrate such an institutional perspective by considering some features of the coevolution of politics and institutions, particularly the ways in which engagement in political activities affects the definition and elaboration of political identities and the development of competence in politics and the capabilities of political institutions.

/pdf/the-institutional-dynamics-of-international-political-orders-4v1onuni6t.pdf

The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders

Scholars of security affairs can stop their dreary quarrels over military doctrine and balance assessments, and turn their attention to finding ways to prevent global warming and preserve the ozone layer. European leaders can contemplate how to spend peace dividends. This chapter assesses this optimistic view by exploring in detail the consequences for Europe of an end to the Cold War. It examines the effects of a scenario under which the Cold War comes to a complete end. The chapter argues that bipolarity, an equal military balance, and nuclear weapons have fostered peace in Europe. It offers an explanation for the peacefulness of the post-World War II order. The chapter examines the theories underlying claims that a multipolar Europe is likely to be as peaceful, if not more peaceful, than Cold War Europe. The peace-loving democracies theory holds that domestic political factors, not calculations about military power or the international economic system, are the principal determinant of peace.

/pdf/back-to-the-future-instability-in-europe-after-the-cold-war-442uyvdvvh.pdf

Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War

Social constructivism in international relations has come into its own during the past decade, not only as a metatheoretical critique of currently dominant neo-utilitarian approaches (neo-realism and neoliberal institutionalism) but increasingly in the form of detailed empirical findings and theoretical insights. Constructivism addresses many of the same issues addressed by neo-utilitarianism, though from a different vantage and, therefore, with different effect. It also concerns itself with issues that neo-utilitarianism treats by assumption, discounts, ignores, or simply cannot apprehend within its characteristic ontology and/or epistemology. The constructivist project has sought to open up the relatively narrow theoretical confines of conventional approaches—by pushing them back to problematize the interests and identities of actors; deeper to incorporate the intersubjective bases of social action and social order; and into the dimensions of space and time to establish international structure as contingent practice, constraining social action but also being (re)created and, therefore, potentially transformed by it.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2601360.pdf

What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge

International Security Studies (ISS) has changed and diversified in many ways since 1945. This book provides the first intellectual history of the development of the subject in that period. It explains how ISS evolved from an initial concern with the strategic consequences of superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, to its current diversity in which environmental, economic, human and other securities sit alongside military security, and in which approaches ranging from traditional Realist analysis to Feminism and Post-colonialism are in play. It sets out the driving forces that shaped debates in ISS, shows what makes ISS a single conversation across its diversity, and gives an authoritative account of debates on all the main topics within ISS. This is an unparalleled survey of the literature and institutions of ISS that will be an invaluable guide for all students and scholars of ISS, whether traditionalist, ‘new agenda’ or critical. • The first book to tell the post-1945 story of International Security Studies and offer an integrated historical sociology of the whole field • Opens the door to a long-overdue conversation about what ISS is and where it should be going • Provides a detailed institutional account of ISS in terms of its journals, departments, think tanks and funding sources

/pdf/the-evolution-of-international-security-studies-2gdx67e39e.pdf

The Evolution of International Security Studies

A working peace system : an argument for the functional development of international organization

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

IT seems to be the fate of all periods of transition that reformers are more ready to fight over a theory than to pull together on a problem. At this stage I can only ask to be given credit for the claim that I do not represent a theory. I represent an anxiety. At home, when we want change or reform, we state our objecti'ves in such terms that all may see how we may attain them. When it comes to the international world, where we are faced with old and stubborn habits of mind and feeling and political dogmas, where the change we have in mind must close one of the ponderous tomes of history and open up a new one, it seems that nothing will do but the perfect goal and winged results. If we compare the general mood of 1919, when everybody was keen to get back to what had gone before, with the mood of 1948 one generation later, when the need for an active international society is almost universally taken for granted-we are justified in regarding the change as progress indeed; a change in outlook without which all schemes for international peace would, as in past centuries remain but noble dreams. Yet, even with that change, present schemes may likewise remain noble dreams if they are beyond the reach of the ways and means of human government. "Government is a practical thing," Burke wrote to the Sheriffs of Bristol, and we should beware of elaborating political forms "for the gratification of visionaries." It is the task of experts, whether individuals or groups, to pass now beyond fine appeals and ideal formulae. Expert vagueness will merely result in popular vacuousness. If that popular receptiveness to the idea of international organization is to ripen into an informed public opinion, it must now be fed with a diet of hard facts and practicable measures, so that it may know how to press and support Governments in the pursuit of an active international policy. How otherwise can it be explained why, with such broad goodwill and sense of urgency, so little has been fulfilled? The general outlook, therefore, is promising. When we come to examine present trends more concretely, two stand out above all-the trend for national self-government, and the trend for radical social change. The two are at work in different strengths in different parts of the world, but they merge into each other. Even in Europe, where state-making seems near to completion, the transformation of society is taking place on a national basis; while in the Middle East, in South-East Asia and elsewhere, the new States express social revolution as much as political revolution. Speaking internationally, therefore, there is in this social nationalism or national socialism an actual danger of regression. The modern political trend has led increasingly to the splitting

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3018652.pdf

The Functional Approach to World Organization

The progress of international government

Marx against the Peasant

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