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Diplomatic communication and resilient governance: problems of governing nuclear weapons

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This article examines the resilience of governance. My descriptive argument identifies variations of resilience by analysing the evolution of contestation and decontestation of governance-constituting institutions in the foreground and background layers of governance. My explanatory argument distinguishes different modes of diplomatic communication, ranging from coercion (most closed) via declaration, haggle, and problem-solving to polylogue (most open). While the occurrence of none of these modes is inconsequential, producing resilience in the foreground and background layers does not become possible unless problem-solving and polylogue, respectively, come to dominate communicative encounters. My abductive analysis of nuclear weapons governance underlines the plausibility of this conceptual framework and elaborates on it further. In the past two decades, communicative practices sidelined open modes of communication. This made the resilience of nuclear weapons governance decline. This study makes three contributions: it provides more details on how to describe governance resilience; it shows that additional explanatory power is to be gained by looking at the breadth of communication employed by diplomats; and it contributes to a better grasp of what keeps nuclear governance together and what threatens to tear it apart.

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This article introduces the concept of diplomatic peace. It starts by developing a heuristic frame for identifying understandings of peace embraced by the actors we study. This frame encompasses three faces of peace — restraint, compromise and polylogue — and further differentiates different degrees of each of these faces (induced, co-operative and categorical restraint; profitable, principled and iterated compromise; extended, communal and deliberative polylogue). Then, this heuristic is applied to key United Nations General Assembly declarations and conventions that have passed unanimously since 1946. Studying how diplomats define peace yields remarkable results. Diplomats make far-reaching promises about the kind of peace they purport to pursue, strongly endorsing co-operative restraint, principled compromises and deliberative polylogues. The added value of this article is threefold: it systematically enquires into the nexus of diplomacy and peace, develops a multifaceted concept of peace, and reminds scholars and practitioners of how far-reaching already existing diplomatic promises of peace are.
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Distinguishes five contending International Relations perspectives on background ideas Calls for more cross-fertilisation across perspectives to deal with conceptual challenges pertaining to backgrounds, agency, as well as change and persistence Summarises contributions to forum The actors we study do not reflect upon their background ideas. They simply take them for granted. Precisely because of this taken-for-grantedness, these ideas are very powerful. They shape world politics in profound ways. The discipline of International Relations has neglected background ideas for a long time. In the last two decades, however, a heterogeneous cluster of research has developed that inquires into what constitutes background ideas, how backgrounds affect politics, and how they come to change. The purpose of this special forum is to take stock of the current state of research, to make authors embracing different perspectives on background ideas engage with one another’s arguments, and thus to improve our explanatory and normative understandings of backgrounds in world politics.
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Develops a rhetorical field theory that conceptualises the relationship between background ideas and foreground communication Distinguishes between two layers of background ideas ( nomos and topoi) that underpin communicative encounters in a field Conceptualises communicative opportunities and moves through which actors change the nomos of a field Illustrates the added value of a rhetorical field theory by inquiring into nomic change in the nuclear-weapons field A burgeoning literature in International Relations draws on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to address the question of how actors make and unmake order in world politics. Inquiring into deeply seated background ideas constituting order, this literature often neglects how communication reproduces and (de)contests background ideas. Our article seeks to remedy this shortcoming by outlining a rhetorical field theory. This theory puts background ideas and foreground communication on an equal footing and conceptualises their relationship in detail. We distinguish between two layers of background ideas ( nomos and topoi) and address the crucial question of how nomic change becomes possible. We introduce a typology of nomic change (destabilisation, adaption, disorientation, shift) and conceptualise the interplay of rhetorical opportunities and rhetorical moves that bring about particular types of nomic change. We probe this theoretical framework by analysing the recent nomic change in the nuclear-weapons field. This empirical analysis provides evidence for our theoretical framework.
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Originally published in 1977, this book deals with the social psychological factors which influence the process of bargaining. It examines the structure behind the process, by which it can be analysed and better understood. Particular attention is paid to the character of negotiations in which agreements are obtained. © 1977 George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd.. All rights reserved.
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Benjamin S. Lambeth is a senior staff member of the Rand Corporation, specializing in Soviet political and military affairs. He served previously in the Office of National Estimates and Office of Political Research, Central Intelligence Agency. 1. For detailed discussion of the principal differences between U.S. and Soviet strategic thought and how they affect U.S. national security planning, see Benjamin S. Lambeth, Selective Nuclear Options in American and Soviet Strategic Policy (The Rand Corporation, R-2034-DDRE, December 1976) and How To Think About Soviet Military Doctrine (The Rand Corporation, P-5939, February 1978). See also Fritz W. Ermarth, "Contrasts in American and Soviet Strategic Thought," International Security, Fall 1978, pp. 138-155. 2. One notable dissenting view, which argues that the Soviet leaders have now come to accept the desirability of mutual deterrence notwithstanding the seeming suggestions of formal Soviet military doctrine to the contrary, may be found in Raymond L. Garthoff, "Mutual Deterrence and Strategic Arms Limitation in Soviet Policy," International Security, Summer 1978, pp. 112-147. For a cogent critique of this article, see Donald G. Brennan, "Commentary," International Security, Winter 1978, pp. 193-198. 3. In this regard, my colleague Nancy Nimitz has argued that among the factors of military capability, external political trends that affect the practical utility of a given array of forces, and national determination (or "resolve"), the Soviet leaders assign the greatest importance to the latter of these in determining their overall strategic prowess and regard the first (military capability) as, at best, a necessary but quite insufficient key to Soviet security. "Soviet Perceptions of the Military Balance" (unpublished manuscript). 4. V. M. Kulish, Military Force and International Relations (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia, 1972), p. 29. 5. For an insightful amplification on this point, which convincingly scores much of what passes for "strategic analysis" in the United States as being little more than uninspired and operationally irrelevant number-crunching, see Edward Luttwak, "The American Style of Warfare and the Military Balance, Survival, March-April 1979, pp. 57-60. 6. A. Migolat'ev, "Who is Forcing the Arms Race and Why?" Mezhdunarodnaia Zhizn', No. 10, October 1977, p. 87. 7. Foreign Minister A. A. Gromyko, "The Peace Program in Action," Kommunist, No. 14, September 1975, p. 5. 8. Lieutenant General P. Zhilin, "The Great October and the Defense of the Socialist Homeland," Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 10, October 1977, p. 18. 9. G. Sviatov, "United States Policy Regarding Armed Forces Construction and Arms Limitation," Voprosy Istorii, No. 2, February 1978, p. 90. 10. Yu. Oleshuk, "The Bankrupt Arguments of the Opponents of Detente," SShA: Ekonomika, Politika, Ideologiia, No. 10, October 1977, p. 44. 11. For further discussion, see Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations (The Rand Corporation R-2154-AF, September 1977). 12. Kulish, Military Force and International Relations, p. 103.
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Bonham, G. M., Jönsson, C., Persson, S., Shapiro, M. J. Cognition and International Negotiation: The Historical Recovery of Discursive Space. Cooperation and Conflict XXII, 1987, 1-19. The research reported in this article represents a continuation of work begun earlier on developing a cognitive mapping approach to collective decision-making. It is based on two shifts in the structure of previous theoretical thinking. First, the emphasis is on discursive rather than psychological imagery. Second, the idea chain or "path" is privileged over the person or the "actor". The cognitive map is thus conceived less as a psychological template than as a discursive space. Rather than conceiving of persons having positions which they bring to decisions and then hold to them or alter them in confrontation with other positions, we conceive of positions as having persons. As a process of negotiations unfolds, its degree of success, within our conception, is to be related to the degree to which the parties can construct a shared discursive space, which amounts to their building of a shared "reality". The new model is situated with respect to extant game-theoretical, "manipulative", and "cybernetic" conceptions of bargaining. By way of illustration, applications of cognitive mapping to the negotiations on the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905 and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference are analyzed.
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