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The agent's logics of action: Defining and mapping political judgement

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Abstract

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. But they miss the winding roads through which actors come to embark on a course of action. In order to overcome this shortcoming, I start with uncovering an important clue on which authors adhering to different logics of action converge; political agency has a lot to do with making judgements. I proceed with conceptualizing political judgement broadly in terms of subsuming particulars and universals. I follow-up with outlining a map for empirical research on judgement that helps us follow the actors in how they figure out what to do (the agent's logics of action) rather than superimposing our narrow scholarly categories on their reasoning (a scholarly logic of action). Scrutinizing the usefulness of this map, finally, I analyse McNamara's exercise of political agency during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The findings underline my overall argument: the inclusive conceptualization of political judgement, coupled with the balance of theoretical and empirical inquiry that the research map facilitates, improves on our understandings of how actors figure out what to do.

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... bargaining and negotiation, deterrence, power-balancing, etc.) are mutually intelligible to actors only on the basis of intersubjectively-shared understandings of what counts as these behaviors and how they can be performed (Onuf 1989;Müller 2004;Adler and Pouliot 2011). There is no single or simple relationship between the various logics of action, and it is unhelpful to try and demonstrate the correctness or superiority of any particular logic (Barkin 2010, p. 57-58;Kornprobst 2011). Rather, my goal is to build on existing knowledge about the range of reasons for action in world politics, and to demonstrate the practical as well as scholarly value of taking seriously the idea that actors make choices motivated in important part by a desire to change or remedy situations at odds with their values. ...
... Does such a phrase indicate a logic of consequences, or appropriateness? While acknowledging the complexity of political judgments (Kornprobst 2011), there are good reasons to allow for the possibility that American concern with justice expressed in the speech was both genuine and not entirely self-regarding. Clinton noted, for example, that "monitoring and responding to threats to Internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats" and that the US government "continues to help people in oppressive Internet environments", including by developing and disseminating multiple means of circumventing Internet controls. ...
... Therefore, man cannot know with any certainty both where he stands in a particular domain and where he is going. He may either strive for clarity regarding the value that others inscribe upon him and thus his meaning as value or he may seek to persuade others to perceive him as embodying a particular value and thus gain meaning that he feels is lacking, whether that is a correct sentiment or not (Kornprobst 2011). ...
... To cultivate and hold onto an identity requires that an individual form a relationship and then persuade others to ascribe to that particular vision of reality, that particular form of social organization. As Kornprobst suggests, there is a continuous (re)negotiation of social relationships predicated on experience and engagement wherein individuals seek to be as persuasive as possible and seek for others to be as receptive as possible to them (Kornprobst 2011). Herein lies the contestation of Nietzsche's blonde beasts, each seeking to shape the world in their image, trying to will their ideal reality into power (Nietzsche 1968(Nietzsche , 1989Petersen 1999). ...
Chapter
Reality is an ever-changing unique presentation of active relational engagements in perpetual tension. Building a unified theory becomes possible through embracing agonic contradiction as the unifying reagent of ontology. I propose that reality is a complex not of opposites but of uniquely presented tensions that lie at the intersection of radical entanglement and radical separation. I suggest that praxis-as-tension between Barad and Weinstein is found in the failed act to achieve absolute separation or entanglement. I then argue for a multiplicity that combines Deleuze’s focus on energy and Badiou’s axiomatic sets to form social superstrings. I finish by developing social string M-theory as a universal system of phenomena that celebrates rather than diminishes particular existential agency.
... Pouliot, 2020). A practice enacted at one moment does not determine the next practice at the subsequent moment but rather creates a space of contingency that opens up endless possibilities (Kornprobst, 2011). Selection must occur; but what will be selected is not deterministically fixed. ...
Article
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Almost every polity uses state awards as diplomatic tools. Their global spread, however, cannot be explained by dominant theories of International Relations (which focus on military or economic rationales) or of diplomatic practices (which lack criteria for what constitutes a functionally suitable practice). The success of such seemingly non-instrumental tools may be better explained with a combination of Modern Systems Theory with the evolutionary scheme of variation/selection/re-stabilization: the diplomatic system generates a variation of practices, enacts selection through the structural medium of peace, and stabilises the selected variant through legal formalization and global diffusion. Using this framework, this paper finds that state awards found worldwide ubiquity for two reasons: First, they satisfy the diplomatic system's societal function related to peace and power, that is, the foregrounding of peace-and-amity while invisibilizing power-and-enmity. Second, state awards exhibit a high degree of generalizability, meaning that they are so flexible that any state can use them towards any other states for any reasons at any time. This paper carries implications for understanding seemingly trivial, noninstrumental features of diplomacy, and, more generally, for the value of Modern Systems Theory and evolutionary perspectives in International Relations.
... Pouliot, 2020). A practice enacted at one moment does not determine the next practice at the subsequent moment but rather creates a space of contingency that opens up endless possibilities (Kornprobst, 2011). Selection must occur; but what will be selected is not deterministically fixed. ...
Article
Full-text available
Almost every polity uses state awards as diplomatic tools. Their global spread, however, cannot be explained by dominant theories of International Relations (which focus on military or economic rationales) or of diplomatic practices (which lack criteria for what constitutes a functionally suitable practice). The success of such seemingly non-instrumental tools may be better explained with a combination of Modern Systems Theory with the evolutionary scheme of variation/selection/re-stabilization: the diplomatic system generates a variation of practices, enacts selection through the structural medium of peace, and stabilises the selected variant through legal formalization and global diffusion. Using this framework, this paper finds that state awards found worldwide ubiquity for two reasons: First, they satisfy the diplomatic system’s societal function related to peace and power, that is, the foregrounding of peace-and-amity while invisibilizing power-and-enmity. Second, state awards exhibit a high degree of generalizability, meaning that they are so flexible that any state can use them towards any other states for any reasons at any time. This paper carries implications for understanding seemingly trivial, noninstrumental features of diplomacy, and, more generally, for the value of Modern Systems Theory and evolutionary perspectives in International Relations.
... 2. The present article thus regards the autonomy of diplomacy as a systems-theoretical issue premising a difference between diplomacy and politics. Other interpretations often seek to retain a political identity of diplomacy by focusing on 'power' as a key explanatory variable, such as when they observe how power migrates from the MOFA to the embassy (Cooper and Cornut, 2019: 315); or they depart from social explanations by delving into the individual-psychological level -in terms of neurological happenings (Holmes, 2019), of emotional states (Wong, 2020), of mental-cognitive knowledge (Kornprobst, 2011), of individual virtuosity (Cornut, 2018), of social bonds (Bramsen, 2022), or of a person's acquaintance with norms (e.g. the literature on 'socialization'). 3. The foreign policy goal is not the only diplomatic-political structural coupling. ...
Article
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Diplomacy is often presented as subordinated to politics as if it merely received politically willed ‘inputs’ to produce politically structured ‘outputs’. However, diplomacy often deviates from political instructions. It can even operate almost without any political considerations whatsoever. This observation gives rise to a sense that politics and diplomacy operate as two separate systems that are mutually dependent and yet simultaneously independent from each other. To illuminate this relationship, the present paper draws from Modern Systems Theory (especially Parsons and Luhmann) to argue that politics and diplomacy engage in double interchanges: (1) they stimulate each other through premises for actions like ‘foreign policy goals’, and (2) they implement each other such that diplomatic happenings can be booked as political successes and vice versa. The discussion section outlines how the autonomy of the two systems varies empirically – such as in the case of politically appointed diplomats – and how extreme cases of autonomous operations (apolitical diplomacy or adiplomatic politics) face negative sanctions.
... Spandler 2015: 609-621). Welche Handlungslogik aber diesen Wandel treibt, lässt sich aus theoretischen Überlegungen oder strukturellen Bedingungen nicht a priori ableiten, sondern muss -und hier zeigt sich eine Nähe zu praxistheoretischen Ansätzen (Pouliot 2007;Kornprobst 2011) -anhand der diskursiven Praktiken der beteiligten AkteurInnen rekonstruiert werden. ...
Article
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Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass die variierende Erklärungskraft klassischer Theorien regionaler Integration auf normativ eingebettete Diskursdynamiken zurückzuführen ist. Grundlegend für diese These ist ein Modell regionaler Integration, das Anleihen bei Theorien kommunikativen und strategischen Handelns einerseits und der English School andererseits nimmt. Im Gegensatz zu den rationalistischen Frameworks von Intergouvernementalismus und Neofunktionalismus stellt es die diskursive Verfasstheit von Integration in den Vordergrund. Dementsprechend begreife ich konkurrierende Integrationslogiken nicht als objektive Kausalmechanismen, sondern als Diskursmotive. Deren Resonanz in konkreten Aushandlungsprozessen von institutionellem Wandel wird von einem normativen Kontext bedingt, der sich aus regionalen Primärinstitutionen konstituiert. Durch eine vergleichende Studie von Verrechtlichungsprozessen in der Europäischen Union (EU) und der Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) zeigt der Beitrag die variable Bedeutung funktionalistischer frames für institutionellen Wandel in Regionalorganisationen und erweitert so unser Verständnis der ‘scope conditions’ klassischer Theorien. Damit schlägt er eine Brücke zwischen der Europäischen Integrations- und der Vergleichenden Regionalismusforschung.
... 9 This question of how such a contextual approach to ethics may be developed is further explored by Bjola (2013). Bjola draws on many others in developing this line of thinking, including: Putnam (2004); Dworkin (1995); Kornprobst (2011). 10 See, for example, the webpages cited in footnote 3. ...
Article
Back-channel diplomacy allows participants to hold dialogues with actors with whom they are not prepared to talk openly. The secrecy of back channels can, however, permit a small elite to escape oversight and scrutiny to achieve unaccountable aims. This article examines the ethical dilemmas raised by the secrecy of back channels. It seeks to develop some practical ‘tests’ that can be used to ask whether a back channel is straying, or has strayed, into dangerous ethical territory. The article advances three such tests for further development, but also concludes that they cannot be ‘absolute’; the context in which a back channel operates is the key variable.
... Yet the social dynamics of judgement are of importance to the functioning of democracy. Kornprobst (2011) refers to Elster (1983 who states: 'If people are agents in a substantive sense, and not just the passive supports of their preference structures and belief systems, then I need to understand how judgment and autonomy are possible.' ...
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This paper proposes a deliberative link in the representation cycle. The deliberative link supports the articulation of social discourses; preferences transformation and the expression of citizens’ judgemental agency. To outline the case, I begin by examining the limitations of congruence theory as a framework for conceptualising the representative system. I then argue for a deliberative link based on the concept of discursive representation put forward by John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer. Such a link requires advances beyond ‘congruence’ for measuring responsiveness. I suggest that future research explore ‘resonance’ in Dryzek’s terms.
... While orders of worth thus offer generalizing principles for attributing moral worth, this is not to say that they are purely theoretical. They are not philosophies that are grounded in objective reason, but critical repertoires that must be used in justificatory practices (Kornprobst 2011). Hence, each model of justice not only comes with principled evaluation criteria, but also with a worldly repertoire of valued objects that are used to measure moral worth. ...
Article
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The article analyzes the contested concept of global health through the lens of orders of worth. Drawing on pragmatist political and social theory, especially the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, I conceptualize orders of worth as moral narratives that connect visions of universal humankind to ideas about moral worth and deficiency. They thereby differ from the self/other-narrative of political identity that is emphasized in International Relations scholarship. Orders of worth do not pitch a particularistic identity against foreign identities, but tie collective identity to a higher common good. They provide tools for moral evaluation and the justification of hierarchy. I use this heuristic to reconstruct four main conceptions of health in global politics: The order of survival, the order of fairness, the order of production, and the order of spirit. Each of them articulates a distinct political identity, as 'we species,' 'we liberals,' 'we bodies' and 'we souls,' and implies different notions of virtuous and selfish conduct in the global community. These orders are derived from scholarly writings and the policies of global health institutions. Finally, I discuss the nature of compromises between the four orders regarding contested issues such as health emergencies or digital medicine.
... What is thus missing in this debate is a theoretical approach that can bridge the gap between pre-reflective and reflective conceptions of diplomatic agency. Despite some recent attempts to open up discussion on this topic (Murray 2008;Kornprobst 2011;Constantinou 2013), the issue has remained epistemologically bereaved and theoretically unsettled. The time for such an undertaking is nevertheless right. ...
Article
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This article: Introduces the concept of world disclosure to diplomatic studies; Advances a new logic of diplomatic action that combines pre-reflective and reflective modes of reasoning; Explains why international crises are defined by fractal not linear patterns; Suggests a world disclosing method for making sense of and managing international crises. Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of ‘world disclosure’, the article advances an original analytical framework for studying diplomatic crisis management. It argues that international crises are not linear but fractal developments characterised by a set of self-similar events that repeat themselves at micro and macro scales in an endless loop unless stopped. As interpretations of fractal conditions are shaped by both pre-reflective and reflective considerations, diplomatic resolutions of crises require ‘authentic’ disclosures that challenge the epistemic framework that allows crises to reproduce. Examples from recent crises, especially the one in Ukraine, are used to empirically illustrate the main theoretical points.
... 8. I deal with this concept in more depth elsewhere (Kornprobst, 2011). 9. ...
Article
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 justifications. It seeks to make conceptual and methodological contributions. On the conceptual level, I contend that political judgements generate public justifications and, vice versa, that these justifications shape future judgements. I outline a three-circuit map for studying the communicative processes that link judgements and justifications. On the methodological level, I argue that what I label a structured, focused communication analysis is well suited to put the three-circuit map to use to do empirical research. I tailor the structure and focus of such an analysis to the requirements of research on public justification.
... Der Vorschlag eines erzählerisch orientierten Handlungsbegriffs fügt sich im Übrigen nahtlos in die gegenwärtigen Diskussionen darüber ein, wie dem kreativen Handlungsvermögen im Begriff von agency ein angemessener analytischer Stellenwert Abhandlungen zugewiesen werden könne (Franke u. Weber 2013), wie gängige Handlungslogiken kritisch zu prüfen seien (Kornprobst 2011) und wie die Fähigkeit der Akteure, in situativen Momenten moralische Urteile zu fällen, auch politikwissenschaftlich beachtet werden könne (Hanrieder 2011). ...
... He may either strive for clarity regarding the value that others inscribe upon him and thus his meaning as value or he may seek to persuade others to perceive him as embodying a particular value and thus gain meaning that he feels is lacking, whether that is a correct sentiment or not. 74 Zizek argues that Heidegger's greatest achievement is "the full elaboration of finitude as a positive constituent of being-human . . . finitude is the key to the transcendental human. ...
Article
Full-text available
Reality is an ever-changing unique presentation of active relational engagements in perpetual tension. Building a unified theory becomes possible through embracing agonic contradiction as the unifying reagent of ontology. I propose that reality is a complex not of opposites but of uniquely presented tensions that lie at the intersection of radical entanglement and radical separation. I suggest that praxis-as-tension between Barad and Weinstein is found in the failed act to achieve absolute separation or entanglement. I then argue for a multiplicity that combines Deleuze’s focus on energy and Badiou’s axiomatic sets to form social superstrings. I finish by developing social string M-theory as a universal system of phenomena that celebrates rather than diminishes particular existential agency.
... By accepting the social-construction of reality, each research agenda is focused on a critical moment in time and space, which presents a unique social hierarchy predicated on the valuation and evaluation of individuals and sub-groups within the group that represents the level of analysis . Kornprobst (2011) argues that systems of hierarchical authority, which is both the foundation for intersectionality studies and the academic community, result from unequal levels of persuasiveness and receptivity. He shows that experts are able to present their own expertise as a successful defense for their arguments, rather than relying on the logic of argument itself . ...
Article
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Introduction Contemporary intersectional research is imprecisely studying systems of oppression and domination, which contributes to the invisibility of unique groups who are even less likely to be studied in the literature and engaged within the policy process. These groups, the least advantaged of the least advantaged, are being hyper-marginalized; they were ignored in early writings but current discourse implies that they are being taken into account when they are still not being engaged adds a level of marginalization. The traits that marginalize these individuals are not inconsequential, but have meaningful implications for their experience in society. This paper argues for intersectional research to further incorporate the advances within uniaxial studies into their analyses in order to gain a more precise understanding of the social and political experiences of uniquely marginalized groups. Each axis must Abstract Intersectionality came about as a critique of traditional, uniaxial studies of oppression. The initial wave argued that the intersection(s) of multiple axes of social construction create uniquely experienced forms of domination and oppression that can only be studied within the context of said intersections. Methodologically, intersectional research has been used primarily as a tool of studying dichotomous intersections of race, gender, and class. Howev-er, theoretically focused literature articulates the importance of operating in a more complex understanding of intersectional axes by adding both breadth and depth. Current intersec-tional studies, therefore, are locked intradeoff between precision and generalizability in any quantitative research and intersect thus far, the power of intersectionality remains unreal-ized. This paper argues for a large-scale expansion of the number of variables studied in order to gain the most precise understandings of social construction. This creates a tradeoff between precision and generalizability. The power of intersectionality however is not in its generalizability, but rather in its precision for the study of small-n groups. We suggest moving beyond the cake model and into acritical intersectionalitymodel that embraces the agential realism of quantum politics.
... [15] This movement is exemplified by Markus Kornprobst's subsuming multiple logics of action (consequences, appropriateness, argument, and habit) under that of judgment wherein he focuses on the dialog premised on reception and persuasion between individual human actors. [16] The injection of constructivist and feminist thought traditions into realist-dominated IR theory has led to a deeper integration with philosophy in general and ontology specifically. Sergei Prozorov has been pain-stakingly developing a hopeful neo-nihilistic ontology, extending from Badiouian set-theory, premised on the world-as-nothing (2012) in order to unveil the emergent generic universalism of humanity (2009) by focusing not on structure, but on the freedom that exists outside of it (2007). ...
... Therefore, man cannot know with any certainty both where he stands in a particular domain and where he is going. He may either strive for clarity regarding the value that others inscribe upon him and thus his meaning as value or he may seek to persuade others to perceive him as embodying a particular value and thus gain meaning that he feels is lacking, whether that is a correct sentiment or not (Kornprobst 2011). Zizek argues that Heidegger's greatest achievement is " the full elaboration of fi nitude as a positive constituent of being-human . . . ...
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Chapter
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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. Empirical evidence strongly suggests that the overwhelming number of non-nuclear weapons states reproduces and even further strengthens the strongest form of nuclear restraint, i. e. the taboo. When it comes to nuclear weapons states, however, there are worrying indications that categorical and even contingent forms of restraint are weakening.
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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 more to cultural congruence than selecting commonplaces such as analogies and metaphors from a repertoire that the audience widely shares. Culturally congruent framing also features a genre and more general themes that are taken out of such a repertoire. My empirical analysis of Tony Blair’s communicative moves to sway the British public to fight over Kosovo and Iraq provides empirical evidence for this framework. This study makes two important contributions. First, it highlights that public contestations about going to war criss-cross the overly neat categories proposed by most scholars interested in this phenomenon. Second, in identifying different dimensions of framing, this article deepens our understandings of cultural congruence.
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Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
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Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
Chapter
Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
Chapter
Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
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The introduction chapter proposes an integrated research design outlining theoretical–empirical framework of the book. This proposal can be used as a practical guide for discursive–contextual analysis of (non)cooperation in international relations. In terms of theoretical basis, (non)cooperation is conceived as an experiential phenomenon mutually constituted by discourse and context. With regard to empirical orientation, the chapter provides a research puzzle by problematizing partiality of cooperation in Turkey–Iraq relations. Four episodes (Saadabad-1937/Baghdad-1955 pacts, Gulf-1991/Iraq-2003 wars) are sketched to explore partial cooperation dilemmas in three main respects: pre-event contextual reasons, discursive reasonings during the event, and post-event contextual consequences. More importantly, this chapter develops hypothetical typologies for analyzing utilitarian–normative ambivalence that feeds into partial ontology and rhetoric of cooperation. Last but not least, the author highlights political narratives–frames that perpetuate partiality of cooperation by paradoxical rationalizations and ambiguous contextualizations.
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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 time, the salience of communicative contexts that enable this agency. Casting our net widely, we show how public justification is related to other, more thoroughly studied concepts, such as legitimacy, authority and power. Encouraging students of public justification to add to our understanding of justificatory processes, we highlight multiple fruitful methodological avenues for studying the concept.
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This article explores how the role of religion is evaluated in global health institutions, focusing on policy debates in the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. Drawing on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatist approach to justification, I suggest that religious values are creative and worldly performances. The public value of religion is established through a two-pronged justification process, combining generalizing arguments with particularizing empirical tests. To substantiate the claim that abstraction alone does not suffice to create religious values in global public health, I compare the futile attempts of the 1980s to add ‘spiritual health’ to the WHO’s mandate with the more recent creation of a ‘faith factor’ in public health. While the vague reference to some ‘Factor X’ inhibited the acceptance of spiritual health in the first case, in the second case, ‘compassion’ became a measurable and recognized religious value.
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Constructivism has a problem in accounting for agent-led change and for what motivates agents to make up their minds about how to put their agency to use. I show that constructivism’s problem of change is related to tensions between constructivism’s own key assumptions about the mutually constitutive relationship between structure and agency, understanding of change and to an essentialist conception of identity. I argue that agency is constituted through processes of ‘identification’ involving identity and narrative constructions and performance through practice and action. I make the perhaps controversial move to regard ontological security as a precondition for agent-led change and to identify ontological security maximisation as functionally equivalent to rationalist theories’ agent assumption of utility maximisation. I identify two strategies for maximising ontological security: a ‘strategy of being’ to secure a stable and esteem-enhancing identity and a strong narrative; and a ‘strategy of doing’ to ensure cognitive consistency through routinised practice whilst also undertaking action contributing to a sense of integrity and pride. The article concludes that although humans are endowed with agency, their actual ability to utilise their agency is severely constrained by their need for maintaining ontological security, which may explain why change appears so difficult to achieve.
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The study of political legitimacy is divided between prescriptive and descriptive approaches. Political philosophy regards legitimacy as principled justification, sociology regards legitimacy as public support. However, all people can, and occasionally do engage in morally reasoning their political life. This paper thus submits that in studying socio-political legitimation - the legitimacy-making process - the philosophical ought and the sociological is can be bridged. I call this construct 'public political thought' (PPT), signifying the public's principled moral reasoning of politics, which need not be democratic or liberal. The paper lays PPT's foundations and identifies its 'builders' and 'building blocks'. I propose that the edifice of PPT is built by moral agents constructing and construing socio-moral order (nomization). PPT's building blocks are justificatory common beliefs (doxa) and the deliberative language of legitimation. I illustrate the merits of this groundwork through two empirical puzzles: the end of apartheid and the emergence of Québécois identity.
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In this chapter we show how a new type of political knowledge can be harnessed from everyday communication flows between citizens to support community and policy development processes. The emergence of this new knowledge will be enabled by an e-supported deliberation process (SOWIT) that aims to improve political communication and deliberation between citizens, civil society organisations, local councils and councillors. To explain the SOWIT project and its innovative approach to political engagement we first outline its motivation with respect to political reform in Ireland. We then discuss the model's framework and features in functional terms. The core innovations are rooted in SOWIT's foundation in the fields of Q-methodology, discursive representation and meta-consensus theory. Finally, we explain how the model departs from the epistemic norms of current political paradigms particularly with respect to public opinion and random selection as a basis for representativeness in deliberative fora. SOWIT is currently being developed as a pilot in collaboration with Fingal County Council in Dublin. Keywords: political innovation, e-supported deliberation, SOWIT, public opinion.
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Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
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Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
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Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
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Interpretive political science scholars argue that language does not only describe social realities but also serves as a medium of their construction. This minimal consensus, however, leaves one crucial question open. What are the techniques on which this construction of the world is based and how do these rhetorical devices bring about their performative effects? In this article we argue that narratives shape social praxis through the process of narration and, in doing so, enable the political dimension of language. A dialogue between political science and literary studies opens a promising avenue for such a research perspective. We introduce the basic narratology of Albrecht Koschorke to develop a methodology for researching political narratives. To illustrate a narrative analysis and to reflect on its methodological difficulties, we examine different narratives about the riots in the UK in 2011.
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This article explores the intertwining of the political and the moral, focusing on just war theory (JWT). It argues that a crucial venue through which adversarial politics infiltrates moral reasoning is the latter's need of temporalisation, especially when called upon to perform moral judgment. Temporalisation is facilitated by temporal contexts and narratives so that the temporal boundaries of the situations-to-be-judged become essentially contested. The essential contestedness of temporal boundaries can subjugate normative language and moral reasoning to the dictates of adversarial politics and relativism. Temporalisation can change morality into an instrument of politics, rather than the other way around. To overcome these problems and salvage morality from relativism, the article suggests that we focus on the structural facilities of international institutions. It argues that international institutions can salvage moral reasoning by changing the structure of incentives facing politicians and encouraging politicians not to aim predominantly at their own, domestic audience, but equally at international and universal audiences.
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Under what conditions is secret diplomacy normatively appropriate? Drawing on pragmatic theories of political and ethical judgement, this paper argues that a three-dimensional contextual approach centred on actors' reasoning process offers an innovative and reliable analytical tool for bridging the ethical gap of secret diplomacy. Using the case of the US extraordinary rendition programme, the paper concludes that secret diplomacy is ethically unjustifiable when actors fail to invoke normatively relevant principles of justification, inappropriately apply them to the context of the case and when the actors' moral reasoning process suffers from deficient levels of critical reflection concerning the broader implications of secret engagements for diplomatic conduct.
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Local ownership has become a central norm of international statebuilding while its practice is seen as failure. This is explained either as an instance of organised hypocrisy where the norm is de facto circumvented or, in a critical vein, as a hegemonic projection of the neoliberal system of governance which by default erases local agency. Practitioners of statebuilding are seen as agents of moulding; social engineers in the policy discourse or conduits of the discursive structure from which they derive their ‘professional reflex’ and authority in the critical discourse. This article suggests that both designations misdiagnose the problem of action as being ‘caused’ by either norm transfer, or by norms being ‘ingrained’ in professional practices. It adopts a micro-perspective on the practice of embedded experts in a series of EU-sponsored projects to offer a contextual account of an on-the-ground interaction. The encounter between Polish and Ukrainian border guards highlights differential power relations and demonstrates the rich texture of the semantic field of ‘local ownership’. The case nuances arguments about tacit institutional reproduction in transnational settings and the automaticity of norm diffusion among security professionals to illustrate instead a contingent role of ‘practicality by judgement’ in their action.
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Honor is misunderstood in the social sciences. The literature lacks both accuracy and precision in its conceptual development such that we no longer say what we mean because we have no idea what we’re saying. We use many terms to mean honor and mean many different ideas when we refer to honor. Honor: A Phenomenology is designed to fix all of these problems. A ground-breaking examination of honor as a metaphenomenon, this book incorporates various structures of social control including prestige, face, shame and affiliated honor and the rejection of said structures by dignified individuals and groups. It shows honor to be a concept that encompasses a number of processes that operate together in order to structure society. Honor is how we are inscribed with social value by others and the means by which we inscribe others with social honor. Because it is the means by which individuals fit in and function with society, the main divisions internal (within the psyche of the individual and external (within the norms and institutions of society). Honor is the glue that holds groups together and the wedge that forces them apart; it defines who is us and who them. It accounts for the continuity and change in socio-political systems.
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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 such a destabilization occurs or not depends on how actors communicate with one another. I contend that whether compromise persists or not has a great deal to do with the interplay of offensive and defensive rhetorical strategies that actors employ. I identify six offensive strategies (recourse, elaboration, entrapment, accusation, ostracism, abandonment) and six defensive ones (accommodation, placation, denial, deflection, inattentiveness, rejection), and chart the degrees to which offensive–defensive exchanges of strategies are conducive to reproducing compromises. Recourse–accommodation interplays on the one hand (most conducive) and abandonment–rejection interplays on the other (least conducive) form the poles of the spectrum of exchanges. I probe my theoretical framework by inquiring into the stability of the grand compromise that underpins the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The findings support my framework. The parties have tended to stay away from heavy rhetorical artillery and stuck to less robust rhetorical strategies. Elaboration and placation strategies have played a particularly important role for making the grand compromise persist.
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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 in politics, its theoretical potential to bridge the rationalist-constructivist divide, and its normative promise to recognize the plurality of society. Second, we introduce different approaches to the coherence, legitimacy and limits of compromise found in the existing explanatory and normative literatures. We discuss why these literatures need to speak to one another, and identify possible applications in empirical research. Third, we conceptualize compromise as one possible solution to a conflict. Distinct from both dissensus and consensus, all compromises share three characteristics: concessions, non-coercion and continued controversy. However, different types of compromise can be distinguished by how mutual, costly and painful concessions are; by whether all forms of coercion are absent; and by the degree to which the relevant parties’ grounds for conflict are transformed. We conclude by discussing the challenge and appeal of ‘politics as compromise’ in plural and complex societies.
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Effective argumentation in international politics is widely conceived as a matter of persuasion. In particular, the ‘logic of arguing’ ascribes explanatory power to the ‘better argument’ and promises to illuminate the conditions of legitimate normative change. This article exposes the self-defeating implications of the Habermasian symbiosis between the normative and the empirical force of arguments. Since genuine persuasion is neither observable nor knowable, its analysis critically depends on what scholars consider to be the better argument. Seemingly, objective criteria such as universality only camouflage such moral reification. The paradoxical consequence of an explanatory concept of arguing is that moral discourse is no longer conceptualized as an open-ended process of contestation and normative change, but has recently been recast as a governance mechanism ensuring the compliance of international actors with pre-defined norms. This dilemma can be avoided through a positivist reification of valid norms, as in socialization research, or by adopting a critical and emancipatory focus on the obstacles to true persuasion. Still, both solutions remain dependent on the ‘persuasion vs. coercion’ problem that forestalls an insight into successful justificatory practices other than rational communication. The conclusion therefore pleas for a pragmatic abstention from better arguments and points to the insights to be gained from pragmatist norms research in sociology.
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This article calls for the accommodation of eclectic modes of scholarship in international relations that trespass deliberately and liberally across competing research traditions with the intention of defining and exploring substantive problems in original, creative ways. The article first outlines a pragmatist view of social knowledge in which intellectual progress is understood as expanding the possibilities for dialogue and creative experimentation. It elaborates on the definition of analytic eclecticism, identifying its distinctive characteristics and payoffs vis-à-vis those of preexisting research traditions. It then considers a small sample of scholarship in international relations that illustrates the meaning and value of analytical eclecticism with specific reference to issues of international security and political economy. It concludes that alongside, and in dialogue with scholarship produced in specific research traditions, analytic eclecticism is a necessary and valuable asset in enabling the discipline of international relations to evolve beyond recurrent metatheoretical debates and to hold forth some promise for having meaningful practical significance beyond the academe.
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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, broadening the concept by identifying the concerns about agency, lifeworld and shared reasoning that different strands of argumentation research have in common. Furthermore, they develop the concept of argumentative deontology in order to make sense of the processes through which argumentation comes to shape global governance. Empirically, the book demonstrates how ideas define actors' interests, shape their interactions with each other, and ground intentions for collective action. Normatively, it provides an excellent theoretical platform for unveiling less visible manifestations of power in global politics and thereby improves our understandings of the ethical implications of global ordering. Addressing topical issues such as conflict and inter-civilizational dialogue, decision-making in international regimes and organizations, the World Social Forum, the Women's Environment and Development Organization and Tobin Tax, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of argumentation theory, globalization and global governance. © 2011 Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst for selection and editorial matter. All rights reserved.
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The debate between a moderate version of constructivist theory and rationalist theory centres primarily on the rationality of individual action. The article consists of an in-depth analysis of the `logic of appropriateness' (LoA) invoked in constructivist theory. The analysis reveals that the LoA is a structural explanation and understanding of individual action. As such, it is untenable as a theory of individual action. The implications of this structural bias are discussed in relation to three core claims of constructivist theory. Moderate constructivist theory claims, first, that norms are constitutive for actors' identities. Second, it claims that agents and structures are mutually constitutive. Third, it claims that changes in ideational structures do occur and lead to changes in political practice. I conclude that the LoA is able to account for the first of these claims, but that by virtue of being able to account for this claim, it is, at the level of a theory of individual action, inconsistent with the second, and unable to effectively account for the third.
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The international relations of the `new Europe' are shaped by a process of international socialization in which the Western community transmits its constitutive liberal norms to Central and Eastern Europe. This process neither fits rationalist assumptions about international politics in a technical environment nor sociological theories of action. Rather, international socialization in the new Europe is best explained as a process of rational action in a normatively institutionalized international environment. Under these conditions, rational state behaviour is constrained by value-based norms of legitimate statehood and proper conduct. Selfish political actors conform to these norms in order to reap the benefits of international legitimacy, but as instrumental actors they also calculate whether these benefits are worth the costs of conformity and how they can be reaped efficiently. An empirical analysis of the behaviour of the Western socialization agencies and the CEE countries supports this perspective on international socialization.
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Rational choice theory, especially game theory, should be seen as complementary to interpretivist approaches rather than as their rivals. Rational choice analysis is most useful when applied to political mechanisms, yet has limited application to belief structures that originate outside the political system. Strategic manipulation of beliefs is best understood through interpretivist means.
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The Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making is a state-of-the art overview of current topics and research in the study of how people make evaluations, draw inferences, and make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and conflict. Contains contributions by experts from various disciplines that reflect current trends and controversies on judgment and decision making. Provides a glimpse at the many approaches that have been taken in the study of judgment and decision making and portrays the major findings in the field. Presents examinations of the broader roles of social, emotional, and cultural influences on decision making. Explores applications of judgment and decision making research to important problems in a variety of professional contexts, including finance, accounting, medicine, public policy, and the law.
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Drawing upon philosophy and social theory, Social Theory of International Politics develops a theory of the international system as a social construction. Alexander Wendt clarifies the central claims of the constructivist approach, presenting a structural and idealist worldview which contrasts with the individualism and materialism which underpins much mainstream international relations theory. He builds a cultural theory of international politics, which takes whether states view each other as enemies, rivals or friends as a fundamental determinant. Wendt characterises these roles as 'cultures of anarchy', described as Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian respectively. These cultures are shared ideas which help shape state interests and capabilities, and generate tendencies in the international system. The book describes four factors which can drive structural change from one culture to another - interdependence, common fate, homogenization, and self-restraint - and examines the effects of capitalism and democracy in the emergence of a Kantian culture in the West.
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Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality. a
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This article proposes a framework for empirical research on contested meaning of norms in international politics. The goal is to identify a design for empirical research to examine associative connotations of norms that come to the fore when norms are contested in situations of governance beyond-the-state and especially in crises. If cultural practices shape experience and expectations, they need to be identified and made ‘accountable’ based on empirical research. To that end, the proposed qualitative approach centres on individually enacted meaning-in-use. The framework comprises norm-types, conditions of contestation, types of divergence and opposition-deriving as a specific interview evaluation technique. Section one situates the problem of contestation in the field of constructivist research on norms. Section two introduces distinctive conditions of contestation and types of norms. Section three details the methodology of conducting and evaluating interviews and presents the technique of opposition-deriving with a view to reconstructing the structure of meaning-in-use. Section four concludes with an outlook to follow-up research.
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The agent-structure problem is a much discussed issue in the field of international relations. In his comprehensive 2006 analysis of this problem, Colin Wight deconstructs the accounts of structure and agency embedded within differing IR theories and, on the basis of this analysis, explores the implications of ontology - the metaphysical study of existence and reality. Wight argues that there are many gaps in IR theory that can only be understood by focusing on the ontological differences that construct the theoretical landscape. By integrating the treatment of the agent-structure problem in IR theory with that in social theory, Wight makes a positive contribution to the problem as an issue of concern to the wider human sciences. At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology.
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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 region. A study of all territorial claims made in Europe since 1848 and in the world since 1945 provides the background for detailed examinations of German and Irish irredentism, through which the author traces the development of the territorial status quo norm based on argumentation and compromise. Developing new theoretical and methodological tools to study norm selection, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, nationalism and European studies.
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Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
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To deal with the relationship between freedom and political government in the space of a single, short treatise is not possible. Indeed, a whole book would hardly suffice to deal adequately with the subject. For freedom, which is only very seldom — in times of crisis or revolution — the direct aim of political action, is, in reality, the reason why such a thing as politics exists at all in human affairs. In this connection, by freedom I do not mean that heritage of humanity which philosophers define in a variety of ways and isolate, to their own satisfaction, as one of the inherent attributes of man. Still less do I mean that so-called inner freedom, in which man seeks refuge when under external pressure; it is historically a later, and objectively a secondary, phenomenon. It has its origins in a withdrawal from the world, whereby certain experiences and aspirations are transferred to the inner, sub-conscious self, which originally were part and parcel of the outer world, and of which we should have known nothing, had we not previously encountered them as tangible, mundane realities. Basically, whether I enjoy freedom or suffer the reverse depends upon my intercourse with my fellow men and not on my intercourse with myself.
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This article discusses the concept of methodological individualism and rational choice (MIRC). MIRC strives to explain international events by positing individuals, states, or substate actors, with fixed preferences and identities, who rationally adjust their beliefs and strategies in response to the information they receive and the strategies pursued by other actors. MIRC derives tremendous legitimacy from its relationship to the two strongest belief structures in the world today, liberalism in the normative sphere and science in the positive sphere. It draws further strength because it presents a unified (at the level of assumptions) body of theory that can be generalized and extended to new issue areas with relative ease. Ironically, for a scientific movement, it is on weakest grounds empirically; confirmation of its findings has been difficult. However, nontrivial empirical regularities have proved very difficult to find for any theory in international relations; typically the more precise and falsifiable the theory, the more resoundingly falsified it is. Given the difficulty in establishing robust law-like findings in international relations, strong theoretical frameworks such as MIRC will continue to be useful in the discipline.
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Wayne Martin traces attempts to develop theories of judgment in British Empiricism, the logical tradition stemming from Kant, nineteenth-century psychologism, recent experimental neuropsychology, and the phenomenological tradition associated with Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger. His reconstruction of vibrant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century debates links Kantian approaches to judgment with twentieth-century phenomenological accounts. He also shows that the psychological, logical and phenomenological dimensions of judgment are not only equally important, but fundamentally interlinked.
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The intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This book fills that need. Here, Philip E. Tetlock explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making.
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Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998) 173-182 Michael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994 (Quaestiones 5), 771p. Patrice Vermeren, Victor Cousin. Le Jeu de la Philosophie et de l'Etat, Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1995 (Collection "La philosophie en commun"), 390p. Not so long ago eclecticism was held to be little more than a non-systematic form of thinking or constructing, and still today that is the generally accepted meaning of the term. Moreover, eclecticism has lost its traditional bad reputation and seems increasingly attractive to late twentieth-century thought in search of non-dogmatic and non-systematic forms of philosophizing. At the same time, however, historians of philosophy are discovering that eclecticism was a distinct and important feature of European intellectual history. In particular eclecticism can be recognized within early modern thinking especially at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in France the philosophy of the nineteenth century can be seen as essentially eclectic until the revolution of 1848. Whatever the significance of the postmodern state of mind, recent views concerning philosophical eclecticism are largely the product of researches into the history of philosophy. There is an obvious inclination of today's intellectual historians to investigate background figures of European modernity. The increasing willingness of historians to enlarge the notion of philosophy in both its disciplinary and historical definition seems to be in agreement with a similar disposition of contemporary philosophers. As we can learn from Michael Albrecht's and Patrice Vermeren's books, a critical appreciation of eclecticism throws light both on the conditions of contemporary philosophizing and on the politics of philosophy in the modern age. What Albrecht does in his encyclopedic examination of eclectic ideas is very different in scope and method from Vermeren's study of Cousin. However, both authors address philosophy as a university discipline, and both suggest that eclecticism resonates in certain strategic ways with contemporary lines of thinking. Although the eclecticism of early modern Germany and that of nineteenth-century France arose in different contexts, here, too, there are important similarities. Both varieties wanted to distance themselves from the mainstream philosophy of their time -- German eclectics fighting the influence of Cartesianism, while France's foremost eclectic, Cousin, was trying to supersede Hegel and Schelling. The first to point out the importance of eclecticism in early modern European philosophy was Helmut Holzhey, and the most condensed account of the whole "syndrome" was given by Horst Dreitzel. We know now that eclecticism was unjustly removed from the history of philosophy. In its past articulation, mainly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eclectic thinking combined the claim for freedom of thought with the rejection of dogmatism and sectarianism. Michael Albrecht shows with great diligence and with more than abundant evidence that eclecticism is a genuine part of modern scientific and philosophical thought, and any reader of Albrecht's long list of eclectic thinkers can have no doubt about the importance of the idea. Over more than six hundred pages Albrecht divides his findings into forty-eight chronological chapters. He tries not to comment on his subject, although eclecticism quickly reveals itself as a tricky thing. Albrecht talks loosely about "the idea of eclecticism," the "eclectic thought," the "eclectic claim" because he wants to keep the idea of eclecticism close to the literal sense of the word: in Greek ek-legere means selecting, or choosing. Broadly speaking, philosophical eclecticism turns out to be in general just a claim. It was used by those who did not want to be regarded as dogmatic, sectarian, or systematic thinkers. Albrecht reports that claiming to be eclectic did in practice not amount to very much, and indeed he notes (457) that no philosopher ever wrote an eclectic work. Around 1600 Justus Lipsius and Jacopo Manzoni were among the very first to advocate eclecticism openly, and here already Albrecht draws his general conclusion: "Practically no author embracing eclecticism ... has made the idea work" (382). This is especially true for philosophers. In medicine and in physics we know of Daniel Sennert and Johann Christoph Sturm...
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Arguments have consequences in world politics that are as real as the military forces of states or the balance of power among them. Neta Crawford proposes a theory of argument in world politics which focuses on the role of ethical arguments in fostering changes in long-standing practices. She examines five hundred years of history, analyzing the role of ethical arguments in colonialism, the abolition of slavery and forced labour, and decolonization. Pointing out that decolonization is the biggest change in world politics in the last five hundred years, the author examines ethical arguments from the sixteenth century justifying Spanish conquest of the Americas, and from the twentieth century over the fate of Southern Africa. The book also offers a prescriptive analysis of how ethical arguments could be deployed to deal with the problem of humanitarian intervention. Co-winner of the APSA Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book on international history and politics.
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The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has been accorded unique status in the history of the Cold War, generally supposed to represent the occasion on which the superpowers came closest to nuclear war and also to demonstrate the benefits of firmness and control in crisis management. Drawing on evidence made available only recently, through a series of conferences involving both scholars of and participants in the crisis, and through newly accessible archive material, the authors of this article call the received wisdom about the crisis into question, highlighting very different implications for current and future policy. They further challenge the very possibility of arriving at any one definitive version of the events of the crisis period.
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To understand international cooperation and discord, it is necessary to develop a knowledge of how international institutions work, and how they change. The assumption of substantive rationality has proved a valuable tool in pursuing such knowledge. Recently, the intellectual predominance of the rationalistic approach has been challenged by a "reflective" approach, which stresses the impact of human subjectivity and the embeddedness of contemporary international institutions in pre-existing practices. Confronting these approaches with one another helps to clarify the strengths and weaknesses of each. Advocates of the reflective approach make telling points about rationalistic theory, but have so far failed to develop a coherent research program of their own. A critical comparison of rationalistic and reflective views suggests hypotheses and directions for the development of better-formulated rationalist and reflective research programs, which could form the basis for historically and theoretically grounded empirical research, and perhaps even for an eventual synthesis of the two perspectives.
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Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action.
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Recent enthusiasm for the social schema concept has been accompanied by a wave of criticism. Skeptics argue that the concept is imprecise and nonfalsifiable, irrelevant to real social phenomena, and simply old wine in a new bottle. While finding elements of truth in each criticism, this article concludes that the strengths of the schema framework more than outweigh the liabilities associated with these criticisms.
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How can abstract symbols provide the basis for organizational cohesion? In the early 1890s, the general strike provided such a symbol for French trade unions. In rallying around this symbol, the unions broke free from competing political loyalties and brought about a fundamental realignment of the French labor movement. The article argues that organizational cohesion emerges through the interplay between powerful symbols, political discourse, and social or interorganizational networks. Using archival records and a statistical analysis of the watershed vote for the general strike, the author demonstrates how the organizing power of this symbol was embedded in local multitrade union federations known as bourses du travail and in the corporatist discourse they evoked.
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Ted Hopf is Visiting Professor of Peace Research, The Mershon Center, Ohio State University. He is the author of Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965-1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) and is at work on Constructing Foreign Policy at Home: Moscow 1955-1999, in which a theory of identity and international relations is developed and tested. He can be reached by e-mail at «hopf.2@osu.edu». I am most grateful to Matt Evangelista and Peter Katzenstein who both read and commented on many less-than-inspiring drafts of this work, and, more important, supported my overall research agenda. I am also thankful to Peter Kowert and Nicholas Onuf for inviting me to Miami in the winter of 1997 to a conference at Florida International University at which I was compelled to come to grips with the difference between critical and conventional constructivisms. I also benefited from especially incisive and critical comments from Henrikki Heikka, Badredine Arfi, Robert Keohane, James Richter, Maria Fanis, Ned Lebow, Pradeep Chhibber, Richard Herrmann, David Dessler, and one anonymous reviewer. I would also like to salute the members of my graduate seminar in international relations theory at the University of Michigan, in particular, Irfan Nooruddin, Frank Penirian, Todd Allee, and Jonathan Canedo helped me figure out the relationship between the mainstream and its critics. 1. The canonical neorealist work remains Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). The debate between neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism is presented and summarized in David A. Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Constructivist challenges can be found in Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Yosef Lapid and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996). 2. Most important for this article, this is the neorealist conceptualization of international structure. All references to neorealism, unless otherwise noted, are from Waltz, Theory of International Politics. 3. Friedrich Kratochwil suggests that this difference in the understanding of structure is because structuralism entered international relations theory not through sociolinguistics, but through microeconomics. Friedrich V. Kratochwil, "Is the Ship of Culture at Sea or Returning?" in Lapid and Kratochwil, The Return of Culture and Identity, p. 211. 4. The critical distinction between action and behavior is made by Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 33-81. 5. Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, "Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security," in Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, p. 54. 6. David Dessler, "What's At Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?" International Organization, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 459-460. 7. Arnold Wolters, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962). 8. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), 391-25. 9. Elizabeth Kier, for example, shows how the same "objective" external structural arrangement of power cannot account for French military strategy between the two world wars. Elizabeth Kier, "Culture and French Military Doctrine before World War II," in Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, pp. 186-215. 10. The focus on identity does not reflect a lack of appreciation for other elements in the constructivist approach, such as norms, culture, and institutions. Insofar as identities are the most proximate causes of choices, preferences, and action, I concentrate on them, but with the full recognition that identities cannot be understood without a simultaneous account of normative, cultural, and institutional context. 11. Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 255. Although there are many accounts of the origin of identity, I offer a cognitive explanation...
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Pragmatism and critical theory share a practical and pluralist orientation to social inquiry. On this account, social inquiry is practical not simply by being instrumentally useful but by being oriented toward the realisation of normative ideals, most especially those of democracy. Central to such an enterprise is the relationship between social facts and norms, where facts are understood in the Deweyean sense of a `problematic situation' that contains factors that both inhibit and enable the realisation of normative ideals. Social facts in this sense can best be analysed by `multiperspectival theories' that take into account all the dimensions of the problem as well as the perspectives of all relevant actors. When understood as practical social inquiry, a multiperspectival International Relations theory could contribute to the task of realising new democratic possibilities, especially now given the `fact' of uneven globalisation.
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Bruce J. Allyn is Director of the Kennedy School-Soviet Project on Crisis Prevention at the Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, with primary responsibility in the preparation of this article for Soviet conferences and interviews, and for the translation and analysis of Soviet transcripts and other documents. James G. Blight is Director of the Nuclear Crisis Project and Assistant Director, Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, with primary responsibility for the acquisition and analysis of Cuban materials. David A. Welch is Research Fellow, Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University; in addition to conducting interviews in Moscow and Havana, he was primarily responsible for the analysis and integration of new Soviet and Cuban data, and for the preparation of the manuscript. The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Graham T. Allison, Jr., Jorge Domínguez, Alexander L. George, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Scott D. Sagan, Georgy Shakhnazarov, and the staffs of the Center for the Study of the Americas (Havana), the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (Moscow), and the National Security Archive (Washington, D.C.). The authors also thank the Carnegie Corporation of New York, George Keros, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ploughshares Fund, and Carl Sloane. 1. The main pre-glasnost Soviet treatments of the crisis include Anatoly Gromyko, "The Caribbean Crisis," Voprosy istorii, Nos. 7 and 8 (1971), trans. William Mandel reprinted in Ronald R. Pope, ed., Soviet Views on the Cuban Missile Crisis: Myth and Reality in Foreign Policy Analysis (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 161-226; Anatoly Gromyko, 1036 dnei prezidenta Kennedi (Moscow: Politizdat, 1971), reprinted in the United States as Through Russian Eyes: Kennedy's 1036 Days, trans. Philip Gavon (Washington, D.C.: International Library, 1973); Anatoly Gromyko and Andrei Kokoshin, Brat'ia kennedi (The Kennedy brothers) (Moscow: Mysl, 1985), ch. 11, "Karibskii krizis," pp. 188-221; Khrushchev's speech to the Supreme Soviet, December 12, 1962, reported in Pravda and Izvestia, December 13, 1962, and translated in The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, January 16 and 23, 1963; and the memoirs of Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), and Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). For a compilation of excerpts from these various sources through 1980, extensively annotated, see Pope, Soviet Views on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Useful and revealing treatments stimulated by the Cambridge and Moscow conferences include Aleksandr I. Alekseev, "Karibskii krizis: kak eto bylo" (The Caribbean crisis: as it really was), Ekho planety, No. 33 (November 1988), pp. 27-37; A.I. Alekseev, "Karibskii, Kubinskii, Oktiabr'skii krizis" (The Caribbean-Cuban-October crisis), Ekho planety, No. 7 (February 1989), pp. 16-18; A.I. Alekseev, "Uroki karibskogo krizisa" (Lessons of the Caribbean crisis), Argumenty i fakty, No. 10 (1989), p. 5; Georgy Bolshakov, "Goriachaia liniia: kak diestvoval sekretnyi kanal sviazi Dzhon Kennedi-Nikita Khrushchev" (The Hot-Line: the secret communication channel between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev), New Times, Nos. 4-6 (1989); Georgy Bolshakov, "Karibskii krizis: kak eto bylo" (The Caribbean crisis: as it really was), Komsomolskaya pravda, February 4, 1989, p. 3; F.M. Burlatsky, "Karibskii krizis i ego uroki" (The Caribbean crisis and its lessons), Literaturnaya gazeta, November 11, 1987, p. 14; Fyodor Burlatsky, Sergo Mikoyan, and Georgy Shakhnazarov, "New Thinking about an Old Crisis: Soviet Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis," in Graham T. Allison and William L. Ury, with Bruce J. Allyn, eds., Windows of Opportunity: From Cold War to Peaceful Competition in U.S.-Soviet Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1989); S. Chugrov, "Politicheskie rify karibskogo krizisa" (Political reefs of the Caribbean crisis), Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, No. 5 (1989), pp. 19-32; Andrei A. Gromyko, "Karibskii krizis: o glasnosti teper' i skrytosti togda" (The Caribbean crisis: on openness now and secrecy then), Izvestia, April 15, 1989, p. 5; Stanislav Kondrashov, "Eshche o karibskom krizise: v kriticheskom svete glasnosti" (More on the Caribbean crisis: in the critical light of glasnost), Izvestia, February 28, 1989, p. 5; S.A. Mikoyan, "A War That...
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the 11 lessons propounded by Robert McNamara in the film The Fog of War and to consider them in the context of theories of strategic management, particularly the formulation of strategy. Design/methodology/approach The film is taken as a case study and the evidence is considered against the background of Mr McNamara's career and contemporary events, triangulated wherever possible by additional accounts so that bias is avoided as much as possible. Findings The paper finds that, despite a lifelong rational, empirical approach, Mr McNamara has discovered that there are limits to these methods. The importance of values, morals and ethics emerges. The importance of these messages is that the business strategist should acknowledge the limits of rationality and the importance of intangible factors, not least the vagaries of human nature. Originality/value The paper is a part of a continuing study by the author of the parallels between military/grand strategy formulation and the similar activity in business.
Article
The realist, liberal institutionalist, social capital, ‘tit-for-tat’and ‘thin’ constructivist explanations for cooperation rely on the same explanatory mechanisms imported from micro-economics. They further assume that international cooperation should be studied from the perspective of egoistic, individual actors responding primarily to external stimuli. These several explanations assume much of the cooperation they purport to explain. They also rest on questionable ontological assumptions, as their unit of analysis, the autonomous, egoistic individual is a fiction of the Enlightenment. Most actors, states included, have social commitments that lead them to frame their identities and interests at least in part in collective terms. Collective identities lead to a general propensity to cooperate with another group of actors. They explain why actors may cooperate in instances that may not appear to be in their interest if cooperation is studied on a case-by-case basis — as it is by the approaches I critique —. To understand how a propensity to cooperate develops, we must look at the ways in which reason and emotions interact to create and sustain common identities.International Politics (2005) 42, 283–313. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800113
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Provides an overview of the history of heuristics and visions of rationality and discusses a new revolution under the premise that much of human reasoning and decision making can be modeled by fast and frugal heuristics that make inferences with limited time and knowledge. The authors discuss a research program that is designed to elucidate 3 distinct but interconnected aspects of rationality: bounded rationality, ecological rationality, and social rationality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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This article outlines a “sobjectivist” methodology that is specifically geared toward the constructivist style of reasoning. The main argument is that constructivist inquiries need to develop not only objectified (or experience-distant) but also subjective (experience-near) knowledge about social and international life. This requirement derives from the fact that constructivism is a postfoundationalist style of reasoning which emphasizes the mutually constitutive dialectics between the social construction of knowledge and the construction of social reality. By implication, a constructivist methodology should be inductive, interpretive, and historical. The methodical practice of sobjectivism follows a three-step logic from the recovery of subjective meanings to their objectification thanks to contextualization and historicization. A brief discussion of the security-community research program illustrates what sobjectivism looks like in practice. Overall, not only does the development of a consistent methodology systematize the practice of constructivist research, it also fosters engagement and dialog with other international relations approaches. By clarifying where constructivism falls on issues of validity, falsifiability, and generalizability, this article intends to enhance mutual legibility among competing methodologies.
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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 as a field of overlapping horizons than a discipline of incommensurable paradigms. Second, the most consequential overlap is epistemological. This overlap is constituted by very specific rhetorical understandings of epistemology that come remarkably close to the Aristotelian Rhetoric and Philosophical Sophistic. International Relations is a rhetorical discipline. Third, dialogue is able to seize the opportunities for communication across different horizons within and beyond International Relations—making it a lively and open discipline instead of a constellation of hermetically sealed and self-referential sub-communities.