ir
Module I
Imagery: Imagery and perceptions impact how we view the world
Schematic reasoning: building mental pictures/tools as a starting point for considering something we are studying.
Mirror images: the tendency of states and people in competitive interaction to perceive each other similarly (to see each other in the same hostility)
Cognitive dissonance: the general tendency to deny differences between one’s pre-existing beliefs and new information
Politics: the process by which any society is going to order and govern itself.
Polity: any organized society
State: an independent legal entity with a government exercising exclusive control over the territory and population it governs
Nation: people (can exist anywhere)
Anarchy: not chaos ! anarchy is what states make of it, anarchy exists because the state wants anarchy
Three levels of analysis (and when to use)
Individual: below the state level, individual leaders (prez), MGOS or groups of individuals, ethnic groups, constructivist thinking
State: state institutions, state as a unit (realism), nationalism, ethnic divisions within the state
Systemic: intergovernmental relationships and orgs, broadest picture, inverted pyramid, structures that cross nations, global phenomenon and response
Module II
Theory: the way in which we approach any study in politics
Require certain assumptions
Require some evidence of those assumptions being accurate
Look at actions and consequences
Can help predict behavior by states, individuals, and systems
Thucydides: wrote the Melian Dialogue, historian from Athens who was the first to coin political science theory, regarded as the “father of political science,” says the fundamental rule of international relations is “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Melian Dialogue: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Realism: Human beings are selfish and self-interested, and so are states (Hobbesian worldview). The state’s primary obligation is to pursue the acquisition of power, the struggle to acquire power leads to conflict. Realists are anti-alliances: they must be brief in duration and for a specific purpose/goal and cannot be trusted long-term.
Relative gains/losses:
Relative gains: if you’re not gaining you're losing, and if one state is gaining another one has to be losing
Hobbesian worldview (and IR): life and states are solitary, nasty, brutish, and short; because the state is full of human beings, it’s primary emotion will be fear
Security Dilemma: a constant struggle for power and relative gains leads states to one-up each other (result of realism).
Prisoner’s Dilemma: two people are in separate interrogation rooms, if they confess, they get to go free; however, it normally ends in both confessing and both getting locked up anyway. It is always in the best interest to confess because one should always assume the other person is making the worst decision. This is how the realists demonstrate the dangers of alliances and prove that no state ever knows all the information regarding a situation, leading to the need to make the betrayal decision.
Neorealism: focuses on systemic anarchy rather than human nature itself. This evolution of realism has two subfields:
Defensive realism: security is best maintained by balance in the international system, evenly matched sides
Offensive realism: if one state maximizes power, it will force balance in the international system through domination (one state is a Leviathan/global hegemon/global governor).
Liberalism: emphasis on the use of soft power (economics) for a state to get what it wants within a state and in the national system. Looks to the more “positive” aspects of human nature, Individual lives, identities, and experiences are centered, Power of ideas, norms, connection, shared experience, and shared belief.
How states become socialized and adjust
Parochial concerns: individual, local concerns (only concern for one’s neighbors and community)
Realists argue we should focus on parochial concerns
Institution: a significant organization, practice, or relationship in a society or culture
Liberal institutionalism: Institutions across state boundaries (IGOs, NGOs), Systemic level of analysis, Anarchy does not prevent international cooperation (prefer institutions).
Complex interdependence: The modern world is complicated and states are intertwined at numerous levels, A middle ground between individual and state level of analysis, Rejects centrality of the state.
Democratic peace theory: The state is centered, but states greatly differ, Democracies do not fight other democracies; they use soft power
Collective security: defensive realism idea, tension in international system is going to create security for all
Ordered anarchy: liberal view of anarchy, structures but not global governor, predictability without a governor
Neoliberalism (and examples): functionalism and spread of institutions from place to place
Ex: European union
Low politics vs high politics:
High politics - military and foreign aid
Low politics - everything else; mostly economics; cooperation is more likely
Constructivism: Everything in the world around us is a construct. Shared ideas are more important than material concerns. Focuses on global and regional norms. Power revolves around persuasion rather than hard or soft exercises of power.
Everything in politics emerges from human thought and behavior
No state of nature, no natural phenomena in politics
Everything has been naturally constructed by humans
Persuasion is they way to reduce conflict, convincing through rhetoric or other means
Understanding through context and human angle, looking at the individual
Criticisms of Constructivism: Too meta; constructivism is the study of politics. Norms are not adopted in a vacuum. Do ethics matter to constructivists?, don’t offer solutions more focused on identifying causes
Marxism: a theoretical critique of the capitalist status quo that views the ruling class as benefiting unfairly through the exploitation of the subordinate working class
-Economic Structuralism:
-Dependency Theory: a theory hypothesizing that less developed countries are exploited because global capitalism makes them dependent on the rich countries that create exploitative rules for trade and production
World-System Theory: A body of theory that treats the capitalistic world economy originating in the 16th century as an interconnected unit of analysis encompassing the entire globe, with an international division of labor and multiple political centers and cultures whose rules constrain and share the behavior of all transnational actors
Feminism
Domestic feminism: equal rights for women, more access to power
IR feminism: looking at concepts that have been ignored because they are associated with feminist levels of thinking, compassion and cooperation in international system without the use of hard power
don’t just study what happens when woman become leaders, talking about the way in which their thinking changes politics and expectations place by international system upon them and why
Module III
Polarity: the tendency of power to concentrate in a specific place or places.
Types of polarity (uni-, bi-, multi-)
Unipolarity - where the global system has a single dominant poweror hegemon
Bipolarity - where power is concentrated in two competing centers so that the rest of the states define their allegiances in terms of relationships with each power
Multipolarity - where global power is divided into three or more great power centers, with most other states allied with one of the rivals
Modelski/Long Cycle Theory: life and death of a hegemon or of a state, mid rank powers go through this, used to take about 100 years, but now after cold war cycles might overlap or be shorter
Stage 1: chaos and warfare, 1 hegemon in state of collapse but new one hasn’t peeked yet
Stage 2: rising action, world leaders undisputed, others act in concert
Stage 3: delegitimization, imperial overreach, difficulty keeping same level of control and has to devote time putting out fires (British and Indian and African colonies)
Stage 4: deconcentration, challenges becomes so great when next major national crisis comes they can’t do what they once did
Hegemon/hegemony : a preponderant state capable of dominating the conduct of international political and economic relations
Peace of Westphalia: ended euro wars of religion, modern conceptualization of states start, state starts to be something of its own without monarchs or religion, dawn of social services (state owes the people more than protection)
Pre-World War I
Focused on economic rather than hard power competition due to industrialization and colonization
World War I era
WWI (ie, levels of analysis)
Interwar period
International rejection of realism; focused on rebuilding, domestic affairs, low politics; dawn of modern liberal thinking; WWI was thought as the war to end all wars; retribution vs. reconciliation
World War II
various analytical reasoning tools for WWII (ie, levels of analysis)
Multipolarity: no clear power globally
irredentism: the desire to regain lost territories by force in order to reunite an ethnic group or nation
Adolf Hitler was driven by a radicalized view of the world
Cold War
Causes:
Systemic: Bipolarity and rivalry between the U.S and USSR; power transitions (power not solely in Europe; first ever bipolar gloabl system)
State: anger towards each other (red scare in the US echoed equally in the USSR); domino theory (the idea that communist will spread if more countries turn to it)
Individual: mutual distrust (leadership changed from WWII era); increased misperceptions
Truman Doctrine: The declaration by President Truman that U.S foreign policy would use intervention to support peoples who allied with the United States against communism
balance of power: soviet response to containment, maintaining tension but not trying to expand
peaceful coexistence: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 doctrine that war between capitalist and communist states is not inevitable and that inter-bloc competition could be peaceful
Détente: A strategy of seeking to relax tensions between adversaries to reduce the possibility of war
linkage strategies: a set of assertions claiming that leaders should take into account another country’s overall behavior when deciding whether to reach agreement on any one specific issue so as to link cooperation to rewards
Rapprochement: US and Soviet Union, re engagement, final stage of cold war, soviet collapse, negotiated arms limitations, ensuring ongoing stability and trying from soviet perspective to have useful partner in the future
Mikhail Gorbachev: soviet leader during cold war era, ran soviet union into the ground (he tried), introduced political reforms while also trying to buy time and hold soviet together, came after two (three maybe?) useless leaders
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: disaster! No one knows why they invaded, but it majorly failed, couldn’t defeat a national less powerful, can’t function in war environment, paper tiger vibes, soviet is in bad state of affairs, US involved in helping Afghanistan (soft power) but not enough that soviet should’ve been struggling
Publicly weakened soviet union
Reagan Doctrine:
Active intervention in foreign affairs, domestic insurrections
Ex. Solidarity movement in Poland
Collapse of the USSR: very rapid demise,
End of the Cold War
levels of analysis
Growth of US power
The proliferation of nuclear weapons
The discrediting of dictatorships and perceived failure of communism
theoretical perspectives thereon
Realism: power politics; economic mismanagement; containment worked
Liberalism: leadership and role of Gorbachev, Reagan, Yeltsin, and Carter; growth of NGOs, IGOs; public opinion and interdependence
Constructivism: external influences; spread of ideas, growth of idealism; contagion theory
Uni-multipolarity: there is a state that’s stronger than all the others, but it’s not stronger than all others combined