Markus Kornprobst

Diplomatische Akademie Wien · Political Science and International Relations

The Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) is the highest alert that the World Health Organization (WHO) can issue. Even though the International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) prescribe tight deadlines and an expeditious decision-making process to determine such a PHEIC, it took many weeks for the alert to be declared to counter t...

This article introduces the concept of diplomatic peace. It starts by developing a heuristic frame for identifying understandings of peace embraced by the actors we study. This frame encompasses three faces of peace — restraint, compromise and polylogue — and further differentiates different degrees of each of these faces (induced, co-operative and...

Zusammenfassung Dieser abschließende Beitrag fasst die Hauptbefunde der 35 Beiträge des Handbuchs zusammen. Ausgehend von diesen Befunden skizziert er eine Agenda für weitere Forschung und entwickelt Empfehlungen für die politische Praxis. Wir betonen, dass dieses Handbuch für uns lediglich einen Schritt auf einem viel weiteren Weg darstellt, auf d...

Zusammenfassung Diese Einleitung behandelt zwei grundlegende Fragen. Zunächst erörtert sie, warum es ein Handbuch zu Außenpolitik Österreichs braucht, worin also die Beweggründe für dieses Handbuch liegen und welche Ziele und Zielgruppen es erreichen soll. Danach geht die Einleitung auf die Frage ein, wie sich die Außenpolitik Österreichs wissensch...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit den Schwerpunkten österreichischer VN-Politik und damit, was diese Politik auszurichten vermochte. Abrüstung, Menschenrechte und internationale Rechtsstaatlichkeit vor dem Hintergrund einer aktiven Interpretation von Neutralität stellten Konstanten dar. In anderen Bereichen, wie bei den friedenserhalt...

We need new analytical tools to understand the turbulent times in which we live, and identify the directions in which international politics will evolve. This volume discusses how engaging with Emanuel Adler's social theory of cognitive evolution could potentially achieve these objectives. Eminent scholars of International Relations explore various...

Grand Strategy is a state’s “theory of victory,” explaining how the state will utilize its diverse means to advance and achieve national ends. A clearly articulated, well-defined, and relatively stable grand strategy is supposed to allow the ship of state to steer a steady course through the roiling seas of global politics. However, the obstacles t...

For decades, globalization and the liberal international order evolved side by side. Recently, however, deglobalizing forces have been on the rise and the liberal international order has come to be increasingly beleaguered. The special issue ‘Deglobalization? The future of the liberal international order’ examines the interconnectedness of globaliz...

Do global health institutions keep up with globalization forces? We contend that they seriously lag behind. While medical knowledge becomes more and more refined in showing how diseases spread globally, the political order meant to address this problem is barely global. It is global in terms of the promises it makes in declarations and even legally...

This study deals with the evolution of different interpretations of nuclear restraint in the midst of a changing technological, strategic and normative environment. I differentiate between three degrees of nuclear restraint, i. e. taboo, categorical restraint and contingent restraint, and embed these in their material and intersubjective context. E...

With the rapid rise of China and the relative decline of the United States, the topic of power transition conflicts is back in popular and scholarly attention. The discipline of International Relations offers much on why violent power transition conflicts occur, yet very few substantive treatments exist on why and how peaceful changes happen in wor...

How much agency do African states have to shape global orders? This study puts the global nuclear order under scrutiny to answer this question. It amounts to a demanding case. Arms control is something that global great powers take very seriously, and there is no weapons category that they take more seriously than nuclear weapons. My findings provi...

This book examines Africa’s internal and external relations by focusing on three core concepts: orders, diplomacy and borderlands. The contributors examine traditional and non-traditional diplomatic actors, and domestic, regional, continental, and global orders. They argue that African diplomats profoundly shape these orders by situating themselve...

Cambridge Core - International Relations and International Organisations - Co-Managing International Crises - by Markus Kornprobst

This article examines the resilience of governance. My descriptive argument identifies variations of resilience by analysing the evolution of contestation and decontestation of governance-constituting institutions in the foreground and background layers of governance. My explanatory argument distinguishes different modes of diplomatic communication...

This article addresses the communicative processes through which leaders succeed or fail to generate public support for going to war. In order to answer this question, I rely on the framing literature’s insight that cultural congruence helps make frames resonate with an audience. Yet, my argument examines this phenomenon in greater depth. There is...

Richard Ned Lebow’s first publications already give away what he is really after. In 1968, he published “Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration” in the Journal of Modern History. The article deals with the question of how Wilson came to declare his sympathy for the Zionist movement in October 1917.

Introducing the special issue, this introduction sketches a broad frame for studying public justification. Addressing the relevance of studying this phenomenon, we contend that justificatory processes are very much at the core today’s politics. Defining the concept inclusively, we highlight the relevance of communicative agency and, at the same tim...

How do actors come to contest previously uncontested background ideas? This is a difficult question to ask. On the one hand, deep backgrounds seem to be too foundational for actors to transform. Their political efficacy appears to end where ideas constitute their efficacy in the first place. On the other hand, ideas must not be reified. Even deeply...

This brief response to Greenfeld’s caveat submits that public justification is not omnipresent, but can extend, and has extended, beyond the modern, liberal West. Subscribing to a thin, rather than thick, conceptualization of public justification, we chart the contested contours of public justification, and urge scholars of this emergent field to c...

Develops a rhetorical field theory that conceptualises the relationship between background ideas and foreground communication Distinguishes between two layers of background ideas ( nomos and topoi) that underpin communicative encounters in a field Conceptualises communicative opportunities and moves through which actors change the nomos of a field...

Distinguishes five contending International Relations perspectives on background ideas Calls for more cross-fertilisation across perspectives to deal with conceptual challenges pertaining to backgrounds, agency, as well as change and persistence Summarises contributions to forum The actors we study do not reflect upon their background ideas. They s...

What explains the European Union’s successes and failures in producing a grand strategy? Conceptualizing grand strategy as a composite commonplace linking together understandings of scene, agent, purpose and means (tetrad), I contend that the European Union has a grand strategy. In the early 1990s, advocates succeeded in institutionalizing the diff...

This book provides a comprehensive new introduction to the study of international diplomacy, covering both theory and practice.

Compromise is routinely evoked in everyday language and in scholarly debates across the social sciences. Yet, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study. The introduction to this inter-disciplinary volume addresses the research gap in three steps. First, we offer three reasons for the study of compromise: its empirical omnipresence...

How do actors, once they have reached agreement on a compromise, make this compromise persist? Being rooted in mutual concessions, it can never be taken for granted that compromises, once agreed upon, stay in place. Contestation about compliance is something that is very much to be expected and does not inevitably destabilize a compromise. Whether...

Existing literature in International Relations has firmly established that public justifications matter in world politics. They make it possible for a range of communities - nations, security communities, global advocacy networks and so on - to take political action. This article aims to improve on our understanding of how communities produce such...

How do individual actors figure out what to do? This article advocates a departure from carving up research on this key question about political agency into narrow scholarly categories. Such categories, especially what has to become framed as incompatible logics of action in International Relations Theory, may make for neat and tidy scholarly boxes...

This book deals with the questions of how global governance can and ought to effectively address serious global problems, such as financial instability, military conflicts, distributive injustice and increasing concerns of ecological disasters. Providing a unified theoretical framework, the contributors to this volume utilise argumentation research...

Territorial disputes and irredentist disputes are very prone to escalation and very difficult to resolve. Since the end of the Second World War, however, European states have tended to resolve their irredentist disputes peacefully. Markus Kornprobst argues that this pattern has arisen due to the emergence of a territorial status quo norm in the reg...

International Relations takes it all too often for granted that different scholarly sub-communities in the field are incommensurable and, therefore, that the erosion of the community of International Relations scholars is inevitable. I present a three-fold argument against this inevitability: First, International Relations is much better understood...

'Global village'. 'Empire'. 'Global Marketplace'. 'Network Society'. These metaphors have become so deeply entrenched in discussions of globalization that it is impossible to understand the globalizing world without them. But, how specifically do these metaphors help us make sense of globalization? Metaphors of Globalization inquires into the power...

Globalization has been represented and articulated in a diversity of contexts, with different implications for culture, economics and politics. Given the interconnectedness wrought by a vast array of global processes, particularly telecommunications, many describe the new dynamics of globalization as generating a ‘global village’ to represent an in...

This book seeks to critically analyse the metaphorical knowledge and practices that constitute globalization. Well aware of the power of metaphors and language, the various contributors resist the temptation to try and grasp the ‘essence’ of globalization. ‘Only that which has no history can be defined’, writes Nietzsche. Instead, our shared premis...

History constitutes our identity, helps us make sense of the world and plays a critical role in persuading people of a particular course of action. Much of the power of history is exerted through historical analogies.1 We need them to orientate ourselves in the world. International relations theorists from classical Realists (Kissinger, 1964; Morge...

Which uses of historical analogies help us compose an intelligible picture of international relations and which ones mislead us? This paper deals with this question on three levels. First, my epistemological argument makes a case for a rhetorical-pragmatist stance on historical analogies. I contend that critical discussion and adjudication make it...

Irredentism developed into an anomaly in post-World War II Europe and — contradicting the dire predictions of the 1990s — has remained an anomaly even since the end of the Cold War. Focusing on the renunciation of the FRG's and the Republic of Ireland's irredentist claims, I propose a novel route to analyse dispute settlement. I contend that nation...

How do states come to select norms? I contend that, given a number of conditions are present, states select norms in three ideal-typical stages: innovative argumentation, persuasive argumentation, and compromise. This norm selection mechanism departs from the existing literature in two important ways. First, my research elaborates on the literature...

Borrowing from Norbert Elias, we introduce the habitus of restraint to the study of security communities. This habitus constitutes a key dimension of the glue that holds security communities together. The perceived compatibility of practices emanating from the habitus that members hold fosters the collective identity upon which a security community...

There are many disagreements among the three main paradigms of the nationalism literature. Yet most modernists, ethno-symbolists and constructivists agree that elites play a key role in inventing and re-inventing nations. Notwithstanding this insight, none of these schools of thought has generated a compelling answer to the question of why the inve...

In Africa, the management of border disputes varies from sub-region to sub-region. Most puzzling is the difference between West Africa and the Horn of Africa. In the latter, border disputes are much more likely to escalate into war than in the former. Seeking to solve this puzzle, this study focuses on the territorial integrity norm. It departs fro...