Hayward R. Alker

The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archeologist of International Savoir Faire

Generated by an intent to write an internationally useful text on the theory and practice of world politics in the twentieth century, this paper represents a preliminary attempt to review and make sense of that field.’ Our focus will be on the contending world order concepts, designs or doctrines embodied within the recent history of globally oriented political practices, as well as the evaluative criticisms, alternative explorations and theoretical rationalizations occasioned by such practices. The search for order in and beyond contemporary world politics has repeatedly transcended or redefined the boundaries of the political. Hence International Relations, rather than its major subdiscipline World Politics, is the most generally relevant academic field for studying contending world orders.

The Long Road to International Relations Theory: Problems of Statistical Nonadditivity

Ever since all the kings horses and all the kings men were unable to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, poets and scholars have often believed that biological, social, and political wholes are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. Most severely criticized among the kings men for their lack or misuse of the relevant surgical skills have been policy scientists using the logical tools of mathematics and the research procedures of the behavioral and social sciences. As world politics has increasingly influenced both individual and national destinies, the analytical and synthetical skills of quantitative international relations theorists, in particular, have come into dispute.

Generalized Precedent Logics for Resolving Insecurity Dilemmas

This paper proposes the development and application of a series of gradually more powerful “reflective” logical procedures to increasingly complex and realistic sets of data on collective insecurity dilemmas. Such procedures place behavioral time series data within narratively structured practical contexts. Such accounts seek grounding in the interaction between situational determinants and the reflective, historical, linguistically mediated inten‐tionality of social agents. Interrelated areas of empirical analysis will include experimentally generated behaviors and narratives from Sequential Prisioners’ Dilemmas and recently collected data on international conflict since 1945, in particular Butterworths reports on conflict management by security‐oriented international organizations. A principal objective for developing precedental logics is to better understand, and so affect, the generation, reproduction and resolution of insecurity dilemmas.

Dialectical Foundations of Global Disparities

This article applies a variant of the dialectical concern with the unity of opposites to the problems of continuity and change in global disparities. Based on a “North versus South” axis roughly indicating levels of inanimate energy use or technological development, and the modifying significance of “East versus West” capitalist and socialist modes of production, four contending, interpenetrating systems of global order are proposed as appropriate units for such inquiry: capitalist power-balancing, Soviet socialism, corporatist-authoritarianism, and collective self-reliance. Recent historical conditioning factors affecting more or less egalitarian development choices, in addition to class conflicts, include major world wars, and relatively late national politicoeconomic development. Lenins 16-point restatement of Hegelian dialectics serves as a summary frame for the major hypotheses of this paper and a methodological critique of much North American research and teaching on world order and global disparities.

Simulating International Conflict: A Comparison of Three Approaches

More obviously than most other recent research methodologies, simulation techniques for the study of politics variously blend intuition, science, and value judgments. Such techniques range from gaming possible future international crises with professional diplomats to discussions with a wholly computerized Barry Goldwater. As dynamic but artificial realizations of political processes, simulation models lend themselves to all kinds of analyses: philosophers and policy scientists may use them to clarify goals or to invent and appraise policy alternatives, while empirically-oriented simulators seek generally to describe and explain political behavior.

Computer Simulations: Inelegant Mathematics and Worse Social Science? †

Summary The development of three positively evaluated social science computer simulations is reviewed as a basis for comments on current debates about the utility of social simulations: Colbys treatment of neurotic belief dynamics, the Abelson‐Bernstein simulation of fluoridation controversies and Alkers projected computer model of United Nations parliamentary diplomacy. In each case, the non‐analytical nature of the computer model is not due to unusual mathematical ineptitude but derived from evidence contradicting the empirical validity of more elegant formalizations employing, respectively, formal logics and graph theory, differential equation systems, game theory and statistical models. Several analytically challenging problems concerning validity assessment, the nature of deep structure, and the policy‐relevant performance characteristics of complex models are mentioned. Moral, political, philosophical and pedagogical issues derive from the empirically provisional nature of all simulation versions ...

On Simulating Collective Security Regime Alternatives

American foreign-policy-makers in the 1970’s have been greatly preoccupied with redesigning and restructuring the International System. As American detente with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China has become part of that period, efforts are being made to revise, develop and institutionalize operational rules, procedures or understandings relevant to a large range of recurring international issues, even including security questions. When some such operational rule systems effectively, but informally, govern the behavior and expectations of two or more tran-state political actors (including the United Nations), we refer to them as quasi-regimes, to be distinguished from international regimes in the fuller sense of quasi-regimes formally sanctioned by international agreements and consensually felt to be legitimate and binding by participating parties. Our concern here is with exploring the effectiveness of security regime (including quasi-regime) practices and alternatives.

A methodology for design research on interdependence alternatives

A common “interdependence problematique†can be found in recent literature on security interdependence, regional integration processes, ecological limits to growth, and global political economy. Six problematical aspects of interdependence relationships should therefore be given definitional significance: existing or proposed transnational or intergovernmental relationships in the post-Cold War era typically raise issues concerning the degree of public consumption interdependence, the extent to which situational interests are non-zero sum, the need for coordinated production relationships, the extent of cross-sector or inter-functional interdependence and the vulnerabilities involved in breaking with or doing without any such institutionalized relationships. Twenty methodological maxims are useful for appraising the design relevance of empirical research on partial, regime-like world order alternatives. Much but not all previous research has been severely deficient in addressing the efficiency, equity, conservation, and feasibility implications of contending interdependence alternatives.

Integration Logics: A Review, Extension, and Critique

Compelling as mathematical representations may seem to some interested in the “automaticity” of integration processes, to other empirical theorists they seem anything but obviously relevant. Yet there is a clear trend toward greater use of formal reasoning in both measurement and modeling work on integration processes. Juxtaposing a variety of such integration logics—the mathematical formulae and conceptual abstractions incorporated in assessments of integration progress and regress—should help achieve the major purpose of this article: to introduce students to a variety of possible integration logics, some of their possible interrelationships, and the limitations of some of the simpler ones vis-a-vis current verbal theories of the integration process.

Boudon's educational theses about the replication of social inequality

Raymond Boudon’s remarkable L’inégalité des chances deserves special attention in an internationally oriented, interdisciplinary social science journal : it offers major, well documented, tightly reasoned, controversial theses about the processual mechanisms underlying the failure of most Western industrial societies to ameliorate some of their most glaring social inequalities through major post-war educational reforms. Yet I feel that its most general arguments, and its most important methodological implications will often be overlooked by critical reviewers. Hence, as a methodologically oriented, American political scientist who has been exposed to several public discussions of Boudon’s work, I should like briefly, but pointedly to emphasize what for me have been the book’s most important contributions. In conclusion, I shall try to suggest points on which Boudon’s analysis most needs further work.