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Blair Peterson

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

  • 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

WHO | Global health diplomacy: training across disciplines - 0 views

  • foreign policy is now being driven substantially by health to protect national security, free trade and economic advancement.
  • he United Kingdom is attempting to establish policy coherence with the development of a central governmental global health strategy based on health as a human right and global public good.
  • Switzerland has prioritized health in foreign policy by emphasizing policy coherence through mapping global health across all government sectors.3 Through the Departments of Interior (Public Health) and Foreign Affairs, an agreement on the objectives of international health policy was submitted to the Swiss Federal Council to assure coordinated development assistance, trade policies and national health policies that serve global health.
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  • Today, Brazilian diplomats serve key roles in health and other ministries to assure policy coherence across the government; they have also provided leadership in key multinational health negotiations such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI) is an international partnership to strengthen health preparedness and response globally to biological, chemical, radio-nuclear and pandemic influenza threats.
  • he interface between trade and health is, in fact, on the cutting edge of health diplomacy. Health professionals need to understand this interaction to assure rational trade agreements, informed by health needs and supported through progressive foreign policy.6
  • It may not matter which takes preference, but it is clear that the growing concern for multilateral cooperation on critical global health problems requires purposeful engagement in learning across these two sectors. In addition, there is a need to include nongovernmental actors, philanthropy and the private sector in this exciting new field of study.
Blair Peterson

Who makes US foreign policy, and how? Analysis by Nathaniel Sheppard Jr. - 1 views

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    Sample of individuals and groups making foreign policy.
Blair Peterson

Review - Brazilian Foreign Policy in Changing Times - 0 views

  • This quest for influence, prestige and power—not for autonomy as such—has constituted the guiding principle of Brazilian foreign policy for many decades, since long before the time period investigated by Vigevani and Cepaluni. It provides a constant goal and explains the broadest gamut of foreign policy initiatives, ranging from the efforts at territorial aggrandizement under the Baron of Rio Branco in the early 20th century (pp. 65, 82), to the somewhat quixotic desire for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council in the early 21st century.
Blair Peterson

Brazil's Foreign Policy Ambitions And Global Geopolitics - Analysis - Eurasia Review - 0 views

  • Brazil’s Foreign Policy Ambitions And Global Geopolitics – Analysis
  • Brazil has been unable to acquire the decisive status it has long desired due to its failure to complement diplomacy with a commanding lead in its military power.
  • To gain the military status it desires, Brazil must not only increase investments in an expanded domestic infrastructure, but also must decide to strengthen its military capabilities and improve its cooperation with the United States as well as with the European Union.
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  • “Brazil’s approach to its emerging role in world politics is very much based on the efficacy of multilateral institutional power,”
  • illustrating the country’s formidable diplomatic strength.[3]
  • Due to this mixture of diplomatic and economic moves, Brazil has become a champion of the developing world, and has been afforded a powerful, as well as a continuing voice in multilateral organizations.
  • Similarly, Brazil’s peacekeeping efforts have been for the most part impressive, but not entirely without controversy.
  • As Professor Amado Cervo at the National University of Brasília put it, “Brazilian diplomacy has not been successful in its attempt to join the exclusive club of political and military power, which remains firmly closed.”
  • First, its defense capacities will need to be increased.
Blair Peterson

Brazil's New Foreign Policy | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

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    From 1961
smenegh Meneghini

Framing Health and Foreign Policy: lessons for global health diplomacy - 10 views

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    This article talks about how health is becoming part of diplomacy and how it is being discussed as part of security: "Several governments have issued specific foreign policy statements on global health and a new term, global health diplomacy , has been coined to describe the processes by which state and non-state actors engage to position health issues more prominently in foreign policy decision-making". "Security, alongside development, is the most recently encountered frame in the documents we reviewed, with the securitization of health now claimed to be a permanent feature of public health governance in the 21st century. Although "health security" is recent in coinage, its history dates back at least to the 14th century when epidemics threatened to destabilize sovereign power and to compromise the material interest of the elite groups".
Blair Peterson

One World, Rival Theories - 2 views

  • 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

WHO | Global Health Diplomacy - 3 views

  • Global health diplomacy brings together the disciplines of public health, international affairs, management, law and economics and focuses on negotiations that shape and manage the global policy environment for health. The relationship between health, foreign policy and trade is at the cutting edge of global health diplomacy.
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