POL101 Essay

International Organizations – Lecture 

• Categories of Empires 

• Geographic – empires defined by the expanse of their territory  

• Inland – Roman Empire 

• Built on military conquests 

• Overseas – British Empire 

• Built on naval power, rules over territories separated by ocean 

• Frontier – Ottoman Empire 

• Built on economic dependence; the empire cannot survive without the territory it occupies 

• Economic 

• Slave-Owning 

• Rentier 

• Mercantile 

• Capitalist 

• Political 

• Formal 

• Informal 

• Military 

• Bureaucratic  

• While globalization, technological changes and transnationalism brought an end to the traditional age of empires, they also created a new kind – global governance 

• Global Governance as an Empire 

• Uses a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the global realm within its open, expanding relationships 

• Decentralization serves as both a blessing and a curse 

• Decentralizing power means, in theory, that everyone has access to power (not the case under the traditional empiric framework) 

• However, decentralizing power also makes it hard to control, organize and exercise power 

• Theoretical Frameworks 

• Realism 

• International organizations are perceived as nothing more than the continuation of a system of sovereign states  

• Global governance does not inherently have power; any power/authority it has comes from states  

• If we believe this to be true, then it must also be true that international organizations are not capable of managing state behaviour (Theory of Offensive Realism) 

• The world as an anarchy – in the absence of government, states will engage in behaviour to ensure their own survival (obsessed with how much power they have AND how much power other states have) 

• Classical Liberal Internationalism 

• Liberals – united in their concern with individual freedom  

• Power is legitimate only when based on popular consensus + respects basic freedoms  

• Key Idea – Free trade generates peace and prosperity because it fosters state interdependency  

• “What works in one context works in all contexts” 

• Neoliberal Institutionalism 

• Mutually assured destruction – making war irrational through increased interdependence  

• The more we move towards cooperation, the more we get a trans-national identity that prevents conflict  

• Key Idea – International organizations mean enough to states that even the worst offenders of international law will join to improve their image 

• Constructivism 

• Power as a social relationship; can be seen in the ways a state engages/does not engage with other states within the global border  

• Delegated authority, moral authority, legal-rational authority  

• Key Idea – Cooperation is possible through rules that work to constrain how states engage with one another within the global system  

• Feminism 

• Key Idea – By not looking at gender, our contemporary analyses of international organizations have major blind spots 

• Significant underrepresentation of women within the institutions of war and peace 

• Examine conflict from the ground up rather than starting at the international level 

International Organizations – Corrupting International Organizations 

• States can and do make retreats from global cooperation  

• Trump’s “America first” foreign policy 

• Roosevelt’s stance on international trade relations (views them as secondary to a sound national economy)  

• In accordance with this, we see that state governments are also capable of abusing their power over international organizations & therefore misuse them  

• 1 – Powerful democracies manipulate institutions manipulate institutions to favour strategically important developing countries 

• 2 – Repressive autocracies exploit UN human rights treaties for nefarious purposes 

• International Monetary Fund 

• The IMF works to resolve the balance of payments + debt issues that developing countries face; its programs of economic reform are funded by other countries in exchange for power 

• The more money a country provides to the IMF, the larger the vote they can exercise on the board  

• The top 5 members of the IMF (until 2016) were the United States, Japan, Germany, France & the United Kingdom 

• Thacker’s 1999 study provides direct evidence as to the United States manipulating their political power with the IMF to pursue political goals outside of the latter’s mandate  

• It was found that a country’s alignment with the United States increased the probability of an IMF loan; in other words, voting with the U.S gave developing countries a better chance of receiving a loan 

• Governments exploit international organizations for their own political interests  

(Vreeland 2019, 205 - 222) 

The World at War – Lecture 

• It is the state that shapes our understanding of war; we cannot talk about war without talking about the state 

• Peace of Westphalia 

• Birthed the idea that states should have exclusive sovereignty over its territory; no one state gets to tell another what to do  

• Enshrined within the UN Charter 

• Ensures that the UN, and any other international organization, needs explicit authority to intervene with state conflict  

• Monopoly of Violence 

• The understanding that the state is always attempting to monopolize violence to obtain complete dominance over the territory that it governs  

• Defining War  

• Sustained, coordinated violence between political organizations 

• Sustained – the extended use of force to kill/injure people and destroy military/economic resources; conflict does not become war unless it is sustained 

• Coordinated – violence must be reciprocated 

• Political Organizations – the actors in wars are organizations not individuals 

• If we believe violence is purposeful, then we must also believe that war is fundamentally coercive  

• The Individual, The State & International 

• Levels of analysis 

• Theories of War  

• Realist Theory 

• The Security Dilemma – a conflict spiral that leads to war; because political leaders tend to focus on short-term security needs, they are often locked into worst-case scenario thinking  

• In adopting this thinking, they engage in a struggle for power/security and use coercive means to advance/maintain their reputations 

• Offensive Strategy – Pursuance of regional hegemony + alliances 

• Defensive Strategy – Focus on avoiding hegemony from another state and maintaining the equilibrium of power 

• Rivalry Theory 

• States become rivals if they have territorial disputes, make outside alliances against each other and/or engage in arms races  

• Onset of war is a process that comes out of the interaction of states over time 

• Bargaining Model of War 

• Two assumptions  

• War is expensive 

• Individuals have access to private information and have incentives to misrepresent that information due to other commitments/indivisible issues  

• Psychological Theory 

• Different leaders produce different outcomes; these outcomes are significant enough to have a probable causal impact on the probability of war  

• Liberal Theories of War (Peace) 

• Democratic Peace Theory – democracies rarely fight each other 

• Model of Institutional Constrains – electoral institutions, decentralization of power, free press etc. prevent/inhibit political leaders from taking unilateral military action 

• Selectorate Model – political survival is the primary goal; as such, autocracies will issue war against weak democracies but rarely strong ones 

• Economic Interdependence – anticipation of war prevents gains from trade which is a deterrent to political leaders  

• Theories of Peace 

• John Galtung – founder of peace studies 

• Personal Violence 

• Structural Violence – harm caused by social structures that perpetuate inequality 

• Negative Peace – the absence of personal violence  

• Positive Peace – presence of social justice  

• Liberal Peace – the belief that liberal political and economic principles are at the root of peacebuilding; promoting liberal values in post-conflict societies will lead to prolonged peace  

• Five Pillars  

• Democratic Governance  

• Market Economy 

• Human Rights & the Rule of Law 

• International Institutions 

• Development 

The World at War – The Territorial Roots of Interstate Conflict  

• Many recent conflicts can be attributed to disputes over border & territory (ex – Russian invasion of Ukraine) 

• Territorial conflicts can be traced to the historical context & circumstance that the border was drawn/states were established  

• Historical precedents + competing ideas of territory  

• To combat the rising trend of interstate territorial conflict, it is imperative to first address their underlying territorial questions  

(Charaniya, 2024).