Jennifer Sterling-Folker

Realist Environment, Liberal Process, and Domestic-Level Variables

This article examines the deductive basis upon which domestic-level theorizing may be combined with liberal and realist systemic-level theory in order to account for international outcomes. It is particularly concerned with whether existing systemic theory can incorporate domestic-level variables in a causally consistent rather than ad hoc manner. In addressing such a concern, it confronts the widely held assumption in the IR theory literature that liberalism is more accommodating of domestic-level variables and their potential causal impact than is realism. When the deductive logic of systemic liberal and realist theory is examined, however, it becomes clear that domestic-level variables can be consistently causal in systemic realist theory, but are accorded little causal weight in systemic liberal theory. The article concludes that realism is actually more accommodating of domestic-level variables and theorizing than is liberalism. Given the common misconceptions within the field regarding the relationship between systemic theories and domestic-level theorizing, issues of theoretical causal compatibility must be considered if domestic-level variables are going to be incorporated in a rigorous rather than ad hoc manner.

Competing Paradigms or Birds of a Feather? Constructivism and Neoliberal Institutionalism Compared

This article compares constructivism and neoliberal institutionalism and argues that in their reification as paradigms in competition, the IO theoretical community is making far too much of what are relatively small differences between them in the metatheoretical scheme of things. These claims are substantiated by comparing functionalism, neo-functionalism, neoliberal institutionalism, and constructivism. Such an examination reveals that they all depend on the same mechanism of functional institutional efficiency in order to account for social change. Thus when constructivism has been utilized as an explanation for change and transformation, it has tended to reach many of the same conclusions, and in the same manner, as other variants of liberal IR theory. In addition, this comparison reveals that, despite its assumption of exogenous interests, neoliberal institutionalism relies implicitly on an identity transformation in order to account for cooperations maintenance. Such a transformation is entirely consistent with constructivist expectations. The choice between neoliberal institutionalism and constructivism is not paradigmatic and is merely a choice between explaining short-term, behavioral cooperation in the moment or its development into communal cooperation in the future. The article concludes with some general observations regarding why this parallel has occurred and what its implications are for our understanding of IO.

Discourses of Power: Traversing the Realist-Postmodern Divide

This article is about the analytical divide that separates realism and postmodernism in International Relations. Written by a realist (Sterling-Folker), and a postmodernist (Shinko), it seeks to traverse the divide between them through a discussion of how the perspective of each represents and makes sense of power. It does so within the context of an empirical case study: the China-Taiwan relationship. Comparing and contrasting how each perspective conceptualises power in its empirical practice and application forces both to grapple with the possibility of a simultaneity of stasis and change, and thus forces both to confront the relationship of constitutive structure and history in their own representations of the world. If our goal is to understand power and the discursive frames we choose to describe it, then the philosophical avenues obscured by the standard realist-postmodern divide are worth traversing.

A disagreeable dinner guest? Waltz and the study of global governance

Global governance (GG) is generally not the first thing that international relations (IR) scholars think of when considering the legacy of Kenneth Waltz. Much contemporary scholarship onWaltz and his Theory of international politics (TIP) (1979) has focused on epistemological issues, his ahistorical structuralism and the empirical inadequacies of his arguments about balance of power. As Sullivan (2005: 333) has observed of TIP, ‘from the outset,Waltz’s analysis has been both derided as hopelessly simple if not outright incorrect and inaccurate, and yet served as the focal point of a growing furor’. Nonetheless, Waltz does not often appear in discussions of GG except as a negative, vacuous counterpoint or comparative ‘other’ who has little to contribute. This is odd. While a great deal of scholarly ink has been spilled on the first six chapters of TIP, it is often overlooked that the last three chapters, and particularly ‘The management of international affairs’, are about global world order and governance. Issues of international organisation (IO) and GG lay at the heart of much of Waltz’s scholarship and shaped a viable realist perspective still pertinent to these subjects today. I use ‘IO’ and ‘GG’ interchangeably here tomean the patterns, organisation and routinised arrangements in the political, economic and social life of the contemporary globe. Most IR scholars prefer to separate the terms so that IO refers to arrangements arising from the Westphalian system of nation-states, while GG refers to patterns associated with the interaction of an increasing number of actors, interests and processes now populating the global landscape. If formalised and hierarchical organisations such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are examples of the former, the latter typically include actors such as non-governmental organisations, individual activist citizens and large transnational corporations that aremotivated to redirect global processes and outcomes for other purposes. Most GG perspectives eschew the analytical privileging of nationstates and formal IOs over these other types of actors and processes, arguing that doing so blinds us to what has changed in world affairs over the last 500 years (Weiss and Wilkinson 2013). It also blinds us to how and why we might, in Rosenau and Czempiel’s (1992: 7) earlier terminology, have ‘governance without government’ in which ‘a modicum of order, of routinized arrangements, is normally present in the conduct of global life’, even as ‘centralized authority is conspicuously absent’ from it.

Announcing a New Editorial Team for International Studies Review

As the new Editors of International Studies Review (ISR), we begin our editorial duties starting from January 2008 with our five-year term running through December 2012. We are most pleased to be taking over the editorship of such a well-respected journal from Margaret Hermann and Robert Woyach and hope to uphold the high standards of scholarship and editorial responsibility that are characteristic and expected of a journal of the International Studies Association (ISA). In this …