Andreas Hasenclever

Interests, Power, Knowledge: The Study of International Regimes'

How and why are international regimes formed? Which factors help determine their continuation once formed? This essay reviews the literature in political science and, specifically, in international relations on regime formation and stability. It identifies and discusses three schools of thought, each of which emphasizes a different variable to account for international regimes: interest-based neoliberalism, power-based realism, and knowledge-based cognitivism. The contributions of these schools to our understanding of regimes are compared and contrasted with the intention of examining how they might elaborate and complement, rather than compete, with one another.

International institutions are the key: a new perspective on the democratic peace

The international organisation of the democratic peace matters. Interdemocratic institutions are particularly suited to block escalation pathways between states and to prevent conflicts from resulting in war. This article builds on findings from three fields of research: (a) the liberal analysis of the democratic peace; (b) systemic approaches to international institutions, and (c) new quantitative studies of armed conflicts. Three pivotal contributions of international institutions to peaceful conflict management are identified: international institu- tions can be used to overcome the security dilemma among states and to tame power competitions. They sustain international cooperation and forestall the recourse of govern- ments to unilateral self-help strategies. Finally, international institutions increase the auton- omy of issue areas, which decreases the risk of destabilising spillover effects from other issue areas. The article holds that these three functions are extraordinarily well performed by international institutions composed of democracies and illustrates this allegation by presenting three case studies of interdemocratic management of former rivalries. Therefore, the distinc- tive features of interdemocratic institutions merit more attention as a supplement to the explanation of the democratic peace.

Does Religion Make a Difference

As observed by many scholars, a renaissance of religious traditions is taking place virtually all over the globe.1 Contrary to once widespread expectations that religion would gradually disappear as a political force in modernizing societies, religious communities have been getting stronger in many nations over the last two decades or so. Their leaders put forward grievances about discrimination, raise claims as to how state and society should be organized, and mobilize the faithful into action. Social institutions such as schools, charities, and hospitals are run in the name of their respective religious denominations. In many Muslim countries, there are calls for the introduction of the sharia as public law. In India, Hindu nationalists attempt to establish their creed as the state privileged religion. In the United States, the “Christian Right” tries to capture the state for the dissemination and implementation of the eternal truth as they understand it.

Religionen in Konflikten — Religiöser Glaube als Quelle von Gewalt und Frieden

In weiten Teilen der Dritten Welt und auch in manchen Industriestaaten wie den USA oder Israel ist eine politische Renaissance religioser Gemeinschaften zu beobachten (vgl. u.a. Cox 1994; Juergensmeyer 1993; Kepel 1991; Marty/Appleby 1993, 1996; Meyer 1997). Von Modernisierungs- und Sakularisierungsprozessen verunsicherte Menschen suchen neue Orientierung in alten Glaubensuberlieferungen und schliesen sich Bewegungen an, deren erklartes Ziel es ist, diesen Uberlieferungen im politischen Leben ihrer Gesellschaften wieder Geltung zu verschaffen. Als pragende Begriffe fur den Versuch einer Re-Organisation von Staat und Gesellschaft nach der Masgabe heiliger und fur den Menschen unverfugbarer Prinzipien haben sich in der Literatur die Bezeichnungen »Fundamentalismus«2 oder auch »religioser Nationalismus« eingeburgert, die wir im folgenden austauschbar verwenden wollen.

Theorizing the Impact of Trust on Post-Agreement Negotiations: The Case of Franco-German Security Relations

AbstractIn this article we argue that trust is fundamental to post-agreement negotiations in the field of international security. We present our concept of interstate trust and discuss its relation to two core mechanisms of international cooperation: control and policy integration. Our main hypothesis is that growing trust reduces a dyad’s reliance on control and leads to intensified policy integration. To specify how the trust-control nexus and the trust-integration nexus structure post-agreement negotiations, we first assume that post-agreement negotiations are likely to follow interstate crises. Second, we theorize crisis reactions and differentiate between low-trust and high-trust situations. In low-trust situations, a crisis indicates a failure to control the actions of others. As a response, demands for institutional reform will stress new and improved control mechanisms. In high-trust situations, the trusting bias defuses most of the doubts about the other’s cooperative preferences and points to miscommunication as the principal issue. Therefore, negotiations will be about intensifying policy integration. States do so for three purposes: sustaining valuable integration, overcoming the crisis, and building trust. As a first plausibility probe for our argument, we look at post-agreement negotiations between France and Germany.

Theories of international regimes: Interest-based theories: political market failure, situation and problem structures, and institutional bargaining

It is appropriate to begin our discussion of theories of international regimes with those contributions which can be referred to as interest-based or neoliberal. This school of thought has come to represent the mainstream approach to analyzing international regimes, and the other two schools, realism and cognitivism, regularly make reference to its arguments in order to give their own positions a clear profile. This is not to say that the neoliberal account of regimes owes nothing to the ideas that are fundamental to power- and knowledge-based theories. Realism in particular provides central assumptions which leading interest-based theories of regimes such as Keohanes “contractualism” and those contributions which we call “situation-structural” have consciously adopted. Before turning to individual interest-based theories, we therefore highlight major commonalities and differences between realism and neoliberalism. The rationalist (or utilitarian) approach to international regimes A most important point of agreement between realist and neoliberal theories of international regimes is their shared commitment to rationalism, a meta-theoretical tenet which portrays states as self-interested, goal-seeking actors whose behavior can be accounted for in terms of the maximization of individual utility (where the relevant individuals are states). Foreign policies as well as international institutions are to be reconstructed as outcomes of calculations of advantage made by states.

Introduction: Framing Political Violence – A Micro-Approach to Civil War Studies

The papers of the special issue analyse intra-state conflict escalation and armed rebellion from a framing perspective. Following Robert Benford and David Snow, framing is understood as strategic communication to mobilise a constituency for political action through persuasive ‘collective action frames’. Such collective action frames comprise the identification of common grievances and responsible actors (diagnostic frame), possible solutions to the identified problems (prognostic frame) and sufficiently strong reasons to push a constituency into political action (motivational frame). In our understanding, ‘collective action frames’ can mobilise people for various forms of contentious behaviour (including armed rebellion), but they can also fail to resonate with the audience. Thus, we expect political violence to occur only if framers make a convincing and resonant ‘call to arms’. In order to show that collective action frames indeed matter for various forms of political violence and most importantly civil war, the special issue investigates two aspects in detail: First, the contributions trace the selection and development of collective action frames (in particular those that propagate violence) and analyse the framing strategies deployed by movement leaders. Second, the authors of this special issue seek to explain why some ‘calls to arms’ resonate and make a constituency support an armed group, whereas others fail to ‘sweep the audience’. By applying the framing approach to the study of intra-state conflict escalation and armed rebellion, the special issue provides a complement to the dominant macro-structural perspectives. These perspectives commonly focus on the opportunity and feasibility of rebellion (due to state weakness, bad governance, the presence of ‘lootable’ natural resources, external military support and geographic conditions), horizontal inequalities and grievances, and ideational structures such as myths, symbols and narratives that define identity groups as opposed to each other. We argue that these approaches tell us only half of the story about the escalation of intra-state conflict. To understand why, under otherwise similar macro-structural conditions, some groups and movements promote violent (as opposed to peaceful) protest and why they succeed (or fail) to mobilise followers for rebellion, it is necessary to take the micro-dynamics of strategic communication

Theories of international regimes: Introduction: three perspectives on international regimes

More than twenty years after students of international relations began to ask questions about “international regimes” (Ruggie 1975), scholarly interest in the “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures” (Krasner 1983c: 2) that govern state behavior in specific issue-areas of international relations continues to be strong. It may be the case that the term “regime” has lost some of its earlier charm (Milner 1993: 494). But the substantive questions that define the regime-analytical research agenda — whether couched in terms of “regimes,” “institutions” or otherwise — still count among the major foci of International Relations scholarship in both Europe and North America. What accounts for the emergence of instances of rule-based cooperation in the international system? How do international institutions (such as regimes) affect the behavior of state and non-state actors in the issue-areas for which they have been created? Which factors, be they located within or without the institution, determine the success and the stability of international regimes? Is it possible to come up with non-idiosyncratic explanations for the properties of particular institutional arrangements (such as the extent to which they are formalized)? Various theories have been proposed to shed light on at least some of these questions. According to the explanatory variables that these theories emphasize, they may be classified as power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based approaches, respectively.

Trust Among International Organizations

Uncertainty impedes cooperation and trust reduces uncertainty. In the wider social sciences, trust is conceptualized as a way to promote cooperation where control is either not feasible to the degree needed or an inefficient instrument to prevent exploitation. More recently, scholars in International Relations (IR) also started to explore the analytical value of trust to better understand interstate relations. Until now, however, systematic research about trust in and among international organizations is extremely sparse. Our chapter presents the main conceptual foundations of trust research and discusses how to apply them to the study of inter-organizational relations in IR. Guiding ideas on this topic can be imported from management and organization science, where a rich literature discusses different antecedents and effects of trust-building between organizations. With the help of this literature, we tackle the main conceptual challenge of IR trust research: to theorize inter-organizational trust as a dynamic process across different levels of analysis. The three sub-questions that make up this challenge and hence guide our chapter are the following: First, how to conceptualize trust in a way that does not occlude its unique features when compared to other mechanisms of uncertainty reduction. The second question we address is how to make sense of trust as an inter-organizational property: How does individual trust relate to and interact with trust at the organizational level? The third question concerns the complex interactions between trust-building processes and different practices of inter-organizational cooperation: How does trust affect cooperation, and how is it in turn affected by cooperative practices? In answering these questions, we provide a conceptual foundation for further research.

Framing Political Violence: Success and Failure of Religious Mobilization in the Philippines and Thailand

How do religious civil wars evolve? Many violent conflicts are fought between groups of different faiths. The paper argues, however, that religious differences rarely directly lead to conflict onset. Rather, the apparent religious dimension of many civil wars is a consequence of successful religious framing. Political and military leaders offer religious interpretations designed to legitimize the use of force and to mobilize believers to violent action. Such framing processes can be more or less successful, depending inter alia on the authority of the political and religious leadership, on the coherence and appropriateness of the frames, on the existence of persuasive counter-frames, and on the availability of communication infrastructures that allow for effective dissemination of religious frames. Comparing violent conflicts in the Philippines and Thailand, the paper shows that religious mobilization can fail along the theoretically predicted lines.