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This article seeks to analyze the impact that sanctions have on democracy. We argue that economic sanctions worsen the level of democracy because the economic hardship caused by sanctions can be used as a strategic tool by the targeted regime to consolida

Despite the fact that much has been written about the relationship between Indonesia and Australia with emphasis on the role of government, little has been done in terms of examining Indonesia's changing domestic politics and the role of non-state actors

Not only has the world political system failed to prevent these slaughters, it has also struggled to cope with natural disasters and the worst international financial crisis in 60 years. Then, when confronted with an ominous and long-range security threat

The aim of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the AKP experience in terms of its electoral success, its mode of governance, and its transformative capacity. In the first part of the paper, I will suggest that this experience and the electoral

In a series of lectures in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault resurrected the Greek word for frankness or truth-telling-'parrhesia'-to investigate the inter-relationships and tensions that existed between freedom, truth-telling and political power. He concl

The election of Barack Obama has raised enormous expectations around the world, including in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). While President Obama's attention has understandably been focused predominantly on formidable challenges at home, in the M

The objective of this article is to develop a novel distinction among four IR approaches and especially to highlight the approach which will be called here 'offensive liberalism'. This four fold division is based not only on a distinction between realism

While realists and neoconservatives generally disagreed on the Iraq invasion of 2003, nothing inherent in either approach to foreign policy accounts for this. Neoconservatism's enthusiasm for democratisation would appear to distinguish the two but its rej

This article problematises two facets of process with regard to peacebuilding: its postulation as a basis for peace grounded in everyday human activity and its construction of violence as anti-process. Its goal is to present the critique of process as a m

The leaders of the neoliberal world order are now intensifying their interventions by unleashing force with impunity while slaughtering people in the name of liberal internationalism's peace, freedom, democracy and security. Their calls, interventions of

While nobody would deny that international relations theory is a secular social science, especially in its "realist" guise, it is interesting to note that a number of commentators and historians of the discipline often turn to religious metaphors in order

In the following paper, I address the relation between political theology and the modern democratic form. To do so, I compare the writings of two authors who have more solid democratic credentials than Carl Schmitt: Jürgen Habermas and Claude Lefort. I ar

Contrary to recent portrayals of a self-confident, newly assertive China assuming its place as a global hegemon, the country's leadership "is in crisis mode", according to a new Stratfor analysis.

Waltz is generally seen as one the most important advocates of a systemic theory of international politics that stresses the importance of international anarchy and marginalizes domestic politics. Locating Waltz's thinking against debates within realism i

As more work on governmentality appears in International Relations (IR), it is time to take stock and deal with a few questions. In social theory, the governmentality approach has mainly addressed "advanced liberal" societies and can be defined as having

In recent times, the value of a critical approach to the study of International Relations (IR) that makes use of the concepts and methods of Michel Foucault has (again) been put on trial. I will argue in this article that both Foucauldians and their criti

This article analyzes the impact of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda on wider forms of international cooperation and argues that the unilateral US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has created an international environment of conflict and insecurity where

Focussing upon recent political philosophical reflections on the War on Terror, this paper asks whether violence can be understood without undermining the empirical and normative potential of public action to curtail it. Explanations of political violence

Technology has always played an important role in global politics, economics, security, and culture. It has continuously shaped the structure of the global system, its actors, and the interactions between them and vice versa. However, theories of International Relations (IR), and in particular those of International Political Economy (IPE), have performed little to theoretically conceptualize technology as a powerful factor within explanations of change in global affairs. Although technology often is implicitly present in the theories of IR and IPE, it is often interpreted as an external, passive, apolitical, and residual factor. This essay argues that to develop a better understanding of transformation in global affairs, technology has to be integrated more systematically into the theoretical discussions of IR/IPE. Technology should be understood as a highly political and integral core component of the global system that shapes global affairs and itself is shaped by global economics, politics, and culture. This paper makes the case for an interdisciplinary approach, which systematically incorporates insights of Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) to provide a better understanding of how technology and the global system and politics interact with each other. In so doing, it opens the field to a richer understanding of how global systemic change is impacted by technology and how global politics, economics, and culture impact technological evolution.

This study asks which attributes make states the more valuable partners in military coalition operations. Due to the uncertainty inherent in combat in general and coalition operations in particular, successful military cooperation depends on the amount of discretion given to national armed forces. Since democracies usually have more harmonious civil-military relations, restricting the discretion of military agents is a relatively less attractive and needed tool for democratic principals. This in turn makes democratic states the more valuable allies. The argument has two empirical implications: On one hand, a state conducting a military intervention should be more likely to build a coalition with its allies, the more democratic allies it has. On the other hand, military interventions by democratic military coalitions should end more quickly with success for the interveners than interventions by nondemocratic coalitions. These hypotheses are tested and supported using data on military interventions between 1946 and 2001.