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Blair Peterson

A Brief Introduction to Theories on International Relations and Foreign Policy - 4 views

www.people.vcu.edu/...468theory.htm

International Relations theories theory

shared by Blair Peterson on 07 Oct 14 - Cached
  • System level analysis examines state behavior by looking at the international system. 
  • State level analysis examines the foreign policy behavior of states in terms of state characteristics.
  • Organizational level analysis examines the way in which organizations within a state function to influence foreign policy behavior. 
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  • Individual level analysis focuses on people.  People make decisions within nation states and therefore people make foreign policy. 
  • Classical realism is a state level theory that argues that all states seek power.
  • However, it sees the cause of all the power struggles and rivalries not as a function of the nature of states, but as a function of the nature of the international system.
  • States don’t just seek power and they don’t just fear other powerful states, there are reasons that states seek power and there are reasons that states fear other states.
  • Liberalism adds values into the equation.  It is often called idealism. It is a state level theory which argues that there is a lot of cooperation in the world, not just rivalry. 
  • Neo-liberals might focus on the role of the United Nations or World Trade Organization in shaping the foreign policy behavior of states.  Neo-liberals might look at the cold war and suggest ways to fix the UN to make it more effective.
  • Constructivism is a theory that examines state behavior in the context of state characteristics.  All states are unique and have a set of defining political, cultural, economic, social, or religious characteristics that influence its foreign policy. 
  • Each author is developing a theory to explain the behavior of all states, not just one state.
  • Can you find universal patterns of activity, universal rules that can used to explain how any state behaves?
  • So you use historical data to test your theories. That’s what you’re examining in your papers.  An author has developed a theory or tested two theories.  How well does the author’s argument hold up when tested against the historical data?
  • The US has always had an idealist streak in its foreign policy (some disagree with this) and sees “bad guys” out there in the international system. 
  • How did these organizations create US foreign policy would be the key question at this level of analysis.
  • People are greedy, insecure, and aggressive, so the states they govern will have those same characteristics.
  • The world is anarchy and states do what they can get away with to gain power and they do what they must to protect themselves.
  • States try to build a more just world order.
  • It is a system level version of liberalism and focuses on the way in which institutions can influence the behavior of states by spreading values or creating rule-based behavior.
Blair Peterson

Night of the Living Wonks - 1 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...night_of_the_living_wonks

International Relations politics theories theory

shared by Blair Peterson on 06 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses also poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world. If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response?
  • For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh
  • Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.
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  • If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response?
  • How would all those theories hold up under the pressure of a zombie assault? When should humans decide that hiding and hoarding is the right idea?
  • Zombie stories end in one of two ways -- the elimination/subjugation of all zombies, or the eradication of humanity from the face of the Earth.
  • If it is true that "popular culture makes world politics what it currently is," as a recent article in Politics argued, then the international relations community needs to think about armies of the undead in a more urgent manner.
  • There are many varieties of realism, but all realists start with a common assumption: that anarchy is the overarching constraint of world politics. Anarchy does not necessarily mean chaos or disorder, but rather the absence of a centralized, legitimate authority.
  • In a world of anarchy, the only currency that matters is power -- the material capability to ward off pressure or coercion, while being able to influence others.
  • How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising: International relations would be largely unaffected.
  • To paraphrase Thucydides, the realpolitik of zombies is that the strong will do what they can and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses.
  • States could also exploit the threat from the living dead to acquire new territory, squelch irredentist movements, settle old scores, or subdue enduring rivals. The People's Republic of China could use the zombie threat to justify an occupation of Taiwan. Russia could use the same excuse to justify intervention in its near abroad. The United States would not be immune from the temptation to exploit the zombie threat as a strategic opportunity. How large would the army of the Cuban undead need to be to justify the deployment of the 82nd Airborne?
  • All liberals nevertheless share a belief that cooperation is still possible in a world of anarchy. Liberals look at world politics as a non-zero-sum game. Working together, whether on international trade, nuclear nonproliferation, or disease prevention, can yield global public goods on a massive scale.
  • The 2009 film Zombieland is about the articulation of and adherence to well-defined rules for surviving in a zombie-infested landscape.
  • 'The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.' I think we can all appreciate the relevance of that now."
  • Provided that the initial spread of zombies did not completely wipe out governments, the liberal expectation would be that an international counterzombie regime could make significant inroads into the problem. Given the considerable public-good benefits of wiping the undead from the face of the Earth, significant policy coordination seems a likely response.
  • Quasi-permanent humanitarian counterzombie missions, perhaps under United Nations auspices, would likely be necessary in failed states. Liberals would acknowledge that the permanent eradication of flesh-eating ghouls is unlikely.
  • Instead, neocons would recommend an aggressive and militarized response to ensure human hegemony. Rather than wait for the ghouls to come to them, they would pursue offensive policy options that take the fight to the undead. A pre-emptive strike against zombies would, surely, be a war against evil itself.
  • "An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead.… [A] zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly."
  • They would inevitably lump reanimated corpses with other human threats as part of a bigger World War III against authoritarian despots and zombies -- an "Axis of Evil Dead." This would sabotage any attempt at broad-based coalition warfare, hindering military effectiveness in a Global War on Zombies (GWOZ).
  • Powerful states would be more likely to withstand an army of flesh-eating ghouls. The plague of the undead would join the roster of threats that disproportionately affect the poorest and weakest countries.
  • Realism predicts an eventual live-and-let-live arrangement between the undead and everyone else.
  • Liberals predict an imperfect but nevertheless useful counterzombie regime.
  • Neoconservatives see the defeat of the zombie threat after a long, existential struggle.
Blair Peterson

Global Response to Ebola Highlights Challenges - 1 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...llenges-in-delivering-aid.html

Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 11 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • A senior European diplomat in Geneva involved in health issues, who was not authorized to speak publicly, lamented the limited international response. “The scale of the epidemic is what the international community is still not getting,” the diplomat said. “It’s becoming obvious that what you need is to scale up by a factor of 20. There’s not enough international coordination and imagination going into this.”
  • uba sent 165 doctors and nurses last week, China has expanded a medical team deployed there, and British personnel are scouting sites for at least five new centers and 700 additional beds that will bring the total closer to the World Health Organization’s target of about 1,300 beds.
  • United States delivers on a pledge to provide up to 17 100-bed units, said Dr. Ian Norton, who is coordinating foreign medical teams for the W.H.O. In Guinea, the W.H.O. says there are four treatment centers working with 160 beds available, with 100 more beds needed.
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  • The World Food Program, acting beyond its core mandate as the United Nations agency responsible for fighting hunger, is also joining the drive, planning to build up to 30 Ebola treatment centers capable of handling 3,000 patients, said Denise Brown, the agency’s regional director for West Africa.
  • American troops are already on the ground in Liberia to build treatment centers, and Britain announced on Wednesday that it would send about 600 military personnel to Sierra Leone to build units and train local staff members. But it remains unclear who will manage and operate the units.
  • After Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines at the end of 2013, the W.H.O. had the support of 151 aid agencies. Six months into the Ebola crisis in three countries, only four medical organizations are on the ground.
Blair Peterson

One World, Rival Theories - 2 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...one_world_rival_theories

International Relations theories

shared by Blair Peterson on 06 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • He sketched out three dominant approaches: realism, liberalism, and an updated form of idealism called "constructivism."
  • Realism focuses on the shifting distribution of power among states.
  • Liberalism highlights the rising number of democracies and the turbulence of democratic transitions.
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  • Idealism illuminates the changing norms of sovereignty, human rights, and international justice, as well as the increased potency of religious ideas in politics.
  • President George W. Bush promises to fight terror by spreading liberal democracy to the Middle East and claims that skeptics "who call themselves 'realists'…. have lost contact with a fundamental reality" that "America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
  • National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former Stanford University political science professor, explains that the new Bush doctrine is an amalgam of pragmatic realism and Wilsonian liberal theory.
  • Sen. John Kerry sounded remarkably similar: "Our foreign policy has achieved greatness," he said, "only when it has combined realism and idealism."
  • Krauthammer argued for an assertive amalgam of liberalism and realism, which he called "democratic realism."
  • Fukuyama claimed that Krauthammer's faith in the use of force and the feasibility of democratic change in Iraq blinds him to the war's lack of legitimacy, a failing that "hurts both the realist part of our agenda, by diminishing our actual power, and the idealist portion of it, by undercutting our appeal as the embodiment of certain ideas and values."
  • At realism's core is the belief that international affairs is a struggle for power among self-interested states.
  • hicago political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, are deeply pessimistic about human nature, it is not a theory of despair.
  • In liberal democracies, realism is the theory that everyone loves to hate. Developed largely by European émigrés at the end of World War II, realism claimed to be an antidote to the naive belief that international institutions and law alone can preserve peace, a misconception that this new generation of scholars believed had paved the way to war.
  • China's current foreign policy is grounded in realist ideas that date back millennia.
  • Realism gets some things right about the post-9/11 world. The continued centrality of military strength and the persistence of conflict, even in this age of global economic interdependence, does not surprise realists.
  • Realists point out that the central battles in the "war on terror" have been fought against two states (Afghanistan and Iraq), and that states, not the United Nations or Human Rights Watch, have led the fight against terrorism.
  • The realist scholar Robert A. Pape, for example, has argued that suicide terrorism can be a rational, realistic strategy for the leadership of national liberation movements seeking to expel democratic powers that occupy their homelands.
  • nsights from political realism -- a profound and wide-ranging intellectual tradition rooted in the enduring philosophy of Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes -- are hardly rendered obsolete because some nonstate groups are now able to resort to violence.
  • Standard realist doctrine predicts that weaker states will ally to protect themselves from stronger ones and thereby form and reform a balance of power.
  • Despite changing configurations of power, realists remain steadfast in stressing that policy must be based on positions of real strength, not on either empty bravado or hopeful illusions about a world without conflict.
  • The liberal school of international relations theory, whose most famous proponents were German philosopher Immanuel Kant and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, contends that realism has a stunted vision that cannot account for progress in relations between nations.
Blair Peterson

Lockdown Begins in Sierra Leone to Battle Ebola - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ebola-outbreak.html

Ebola Africa Sierra Leone

shared by Blair Peterson on 20 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The United States is planning to build as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia, with about 1,700 treatment beds, while the United Nations is planning an expanded mission in the region, based in Accra, Ghana, according to Anthony Banbury, the United Nation’s Ebola operation crisis manager. It is intended to be more nimble than the United Nations’ notoriously bureaucratic operations, bringing in as many as 500 trucks and jeeps from other missions in Africa, possibly paying teams in one country to speed up safe burials, buying fuel for monitoring teams in another country, or offering helicopters to transport health workers where they are needed.
  • Whether Sierra Leone’s lockdown will constitute an effective response is open to question. Despite the mobilization, the volunteers hardly appeared to be thick on the ground. In some neighborhoods, residents said they were yet to see any of the green-vested young men and women who had volunteered.
Blair Peterson

UN human rights chief criticises security council over global conflicts | World news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-council-over-global-conflicts

International Relations United Nations UN world news

shared by Blair Peterson on 28 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • “These crises hammer home the full cost of the international community’s failure to prevent conflict,” Pillay said. “None of these crises erupted without warning.”
  • Pillay said Syria’s conflict “is metastasing outwards in an uncontrollable process whose eventual limits we cannot predict”. She also cited conflicts in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza.
  • The resolution acknowledged that the United Nations has not always used the tools in its charter for preventing conflict. It prescribed several steps for improvement, focusing on addressing human rights violations earlier and recognizing that such abuses are often warning signs of looming conflicts.
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    • Blair Peterson
      Blair Peterson on 28 Aug 14
       
      What are the tools in the charter that can be used to prevent conflicts? Why have they decided to not use them in the past?
  • The resolution said little about the political differences that often paralyze the security council, where sharp divisions between veto-holding members Russia and the United States have often thwarted action on Syria and Ukraine.
  • “Short-term geopolitical considerations and national interest, narrowly defined, have repeatedly taken precedence over intolerable human suffering and grave breaches of and long-term threats to international peace and security,”
  • The human rights chief said the use of veto power on the security council “to stop action intended to prevent or defuse conflict is a short-term and ultimately counter-productive tactic”.
  • And she suggested building on the Arms Trade Treaty by requiring that, in countries where there are human rights concerns, governments accept a small human rights monitoring team as a condition of purchasing weapons.
Blair Peterson

Israel Kills 3 Top Hamas Leaders as Latest Fighting Turns Its Way - NYTimes.com - 7 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-strip.html

International Relations gaza Israel Palestine

shared by Blair Peterson on 22 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • But the latest round of fighting appears to have given Israel the upper hand in a conflict that has already outlasted all expectations and is increasingly becoming a war of attrition.
  • Israel’s advantage has never looked more lopsided. In contrast to the earlier phase of the war, Israel this week deployed its extensive intelligence capabilities and overwhelming firepower in targeted bombings with limited civilian casualties less likely to raise the world’s ire.
  • “There’s a longstanding conventional wisdom that Israel doesn’t do well in wars of attrition,” said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian and a former ambassador to the United States. “That overlooks a broader historical view that Israel’s entire existence has been a war of attrition, and we’ve won that war.”
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  • Even more significant would be the death of Mohammed Deif, the shadowy figure who has survived several previous Israeli assassination attempts with severe injuries and was the target of Tuesday night’s attack. Mr. Deif’s fate remained unknown Thursday, though the body of his 3-year-old daughter, Sara, was recovered from the rubble of the Gaza City home where five one-ton bombs also killed Mr. Deif’s wife, baby son and at least three others.
  • Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli chief of military intelligence, called the killing of Mr. Deif’s three deputies “a very important operational achievement” and said that if Mr. Deif also turns up dead, “this will badly hurt Hamas’s military wing.”
  • “We’re now going to a war of attrition that was a threat of Hamas. Israel basically turned it upside down and said, ‘You want attrition? You are welcome. You lost your strategic military tools against Israel. Our firepower and our intelligence and our capability to sustain more days is much bigger than yours.’ This is the strategy.
  • The Gaza Health Ministry said Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 60 people since the collapse on Tuesday of cease-fire negotiations in Cairo and the resumption of violence after nearly nine days of quiet, bringing the Palestinian death toll in the operation that began July 8 close to 2,100.
  • As the conflict grinds on, Israelis see time as on their side. Experts estimate that Hamas began the summer with a stockpile of about 10,000 rockets. It has fired nearly 4,000, according to the Israeli military, which says it has taken out at least 3,000 more. So it cannot keep launching at this pace for long.
  • With Israel and the Palestinians apparently still far apart on terms for a durable truce, analysts suggested settling in for days or even weeks more of cross-border air exchanges, after what is already the longest Israeli military operation in decades. Diplomatic pressure appeared to be easing, if only because the world’s attention seems focused on other crises including the rise of Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, the Ebola outbreak in Africa and civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo.
    • Blair Peterson
      Blair Peterson on 22 Aug 14
       
      Look at how other events around the world impact this major conflict.
  • Israel has much vaster resources, though its politicians and people are increasingly fractured over the prosecution of the campaign. There are growing calls for a more aggressive ground invasion, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted, and intense opposition to the idea of making concessions in a cease-fire agreement that might seem to reward Hamas.
    • Blair Peterson
      Blair Peterson on 22 Aug 14
       
      The right wing position.
  • In Gaza, time is a liability. The number of displaced residents seeking shelter in United Nations schools swelled to nearly 300,000 as the violence resumed; officials have already given up any hope of classes starting Sunday as planned.
  • When Sergeant Shalit was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in October 2011 after Hamas held him in captivity for five years, it was Mr. Attar seen in a video ushering him from a pickup truck. Mr. Abu Shamalah, the Israeli military said, was also involved in a 2004 tunnel attack that killed six soldiers, and the 1994 murder of an Israeli officer in Rafah.
  • “Israel can play that game for a long time, certainly longer than Hamas can. That’s true on a purely military level, but the fact is, as the war drags on, it’s going to be harder and harder for Netanyahu not to do one of those two things.”
  • In the Rafah refugee camp, a friend of Mr. Abu Shamalah’s said he had last seen him at the onset of the war, with Mr. Attar, and that he had said then he hoped to be a martyr.
Blair Peterson

Better Staffing Seen as Crucial to Ebola Treatment in Africa - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ebola-treatment-in-africa.html

Global Health Diplomacy International Relations Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 05 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Most of the patients in the United States also received experimental drugs or plasma transfusions, but doctors say rehydration played a major role in saving them.
  • Ebola wards need an unusually high level of staffing, Dr. Sprecher said. Not only does each patient require a lot of care, but the protective gear causes health workers to overheat so quickly and severely, especially in wards that lack air-conditioning in bare-bones facilities, that they cannot work for more than an hour without coming out to cool down. Extra workers are needed so that they can spell each other.
Blair Peterson

As U.S. Steps Up Fight, J.F.K. Begins Screening Passengers for Ebola - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ola-jfk-is-on-front-lines.html

International Relations Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Kennedy was the first of five American airports to introduce Ebola screening protocols, and the new measures were the latest indication of the risk that the disease presented.
  • Beginning next week, Washington Dulles, Newark Liberty, Chicago O’Hare and Atlanta international airports will employ the same screenings as those put in place at J.F.K.
  • Since at least the 14th century, when the bubonic plague devastated Europe, posting medical officers at a port of entry has been one of the main tools used to try to halt the spread of disease.An outbreak of yellow fever in 1878 led the United States Congress to grant the federal government the authority to order a quarantine to prevent its spread.
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  • Those powers were enhanced in 1892 to try to prevent another scourge, cholera
Blair Peterson

New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-epidemic-who-west-africa.html

International Relations Ebola

shared by Blair Peterson on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The Security Council in September passed a resolution that declared Ebola a threat to international peace and security. On Tuesday, it heard sobering alarms about Ebola’s widening impact on the region.
  • Hervé Ladsous, the under secretary general for peacekeeping, told the Council that 39 peacekeepers in Liberia were currently “under quarantine or are being closely watched for possible exposure.”
  • While the United States, Canada and Britain have taken emergency steps to screen international passengers to limit the risk of importing Ebola, most of Europe is still struggling with that issue.
Blair Peterson

SARS: A Pandemic Prevented (2013) - 0 views

www.ucsusa.org/...sars.html

International Relations Global Public Health SARS

shared by Blair Peterson on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) network of 11 laboratories in nine countries around the world worked to combat the disease.
  • Transparency and a commitment to sharing the best available scientific information led to a better outcome.
  • Clear and effective communication among scientists, policy makers, and the public helped avoid SARS deaths in the United States.
  • Blair Peterson on 22 Oct 14
     
    "SARS: A Pandemic Prevented (2013)"
Blair Peterson

As Ebola Rages, Poor Planning Thwarts Efforts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-planning-thwarts-efforts.html

International Relations Ebola Public Health

shared by Blair Peterson on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • But one piece is missing: staff. The facility opened recently with a skeleton crew. Now, in an especially hard-hit area where people are dying every day because they cannot get into an Ebola clinic, 60 of the 80 beds at the Kerry Town Ebola clinic are not being used.
  • It is like this with a lot here: good intentions, bad planning. Aid officials in Sierra Leone say poor coordination among aid groups, government mismanagement and some glaring inefficiencies are costing countless lives.
  • Even after patients recover, many treatment centers delay releasing them for more than a week until there are enough other survivors, sometimes dozens, to hold one huge goodbye ceremony for everyone — again, keeping desperately needed beds occupied. “I just wanted to get home and see my wife,” said Suliman Wafta, a recent Ebola survivor treated nearby. “But I had to wait eight extra days.
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  • “Why are the British here? To end Ebola, or party?” read a headline in a local newspaper. It added, “While their American counterparts are working hard to end Ebola in Liberia, our so-called colonial masters are busy living the life of Riley.”
  • Like others, the official kept citing the “Brits’ primacy” in Sierra Leone — a reference to how, several months ago, Western powers divided Ebola responsibilities in West Africa along historical lines, with the United States helping Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves in 1822; France helping a former colony, Guinea; and Britain helping its own former colony, Sierra Leone.
  • Many aid officials in Sierra Leone said they crave a more effective command structure. The government runs a national emergency center, but aid officials said that with scores of foreign experts, government delegations and private charities flocking here, coordination was still messy, with many gaps and overlaps. It is extremely difficult, they said, to get even the most basic information, including how many treatment centers exist.
  • There are also growing questions about corruption, with the government announcing recently that it had found 6,000 “ghost medical workers” on its payroll, even as real Ebola burial teams and front-line health officers say they have not been paid in weeks.
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