Matthew Evangelista

Norms, Heresthetics, and the End of the Cold War

The academic debate about the end of the Cold War has reached an impasse. Realists draw on evidence of economic decline and external pressure to explain the Soviet Unions retrenchment. Constructivists emphasize ideational change and Mikhail Gorbachevs new thinking as the source of accommodation. Neither approach sufficiently accounts for the fact that many powerful Soviet institutions did not support Gorbachevs approach from early on, well before his decisions contributed to the disintegration of the country. Even so, Gorbachev persuaded influential people who disagreed with him to accept his policy proposals. William Rikers concept of herestheticsthe use of language to manipulate the political agendagoes a long way toward explaining Gorbachevs success. Heresthetics could be a way to bridge the gap between realist and constructivist approaches to international relations.

Why the Soviets Buy the Weapons They Do

The authors of three recent books attempt to account for Soviet military developments by exploring a wide range of possible explanations. In Soviet Strategic Forces , Berman and Baker adopt a“requirements“approach; they argue that the Soviet strategic posture has developed mainly in response to threats generated by the West. Andrew Cockburn, in The Threat , maintains that internal factors—in particular, bureaucratic politics and the workings of the military-industrial complex—are responsible for Soviet weapons decisions. David Holloways more eclectic explanation, in The Soviet Union and the Arms Race , describes both the internal and external determinants of Soviet military policy. The evolution of Soviet regional nuclear policy, and particularly the deployment of the SS-20 missile, can be accounted for by several different explanations—indicating a problem of overdetermination of causes. One way to resolve this problem is by adopting a framework developed by James Kurth to explain U.S. weapons procurement. It suggests that the“modes of causation” for Soviet weapons decisions are generally the opposite of those for American decisions. This generalization is consistent with what an analysis based on the relative strengths of state and societal forces in the two countries would predict.

Libere sempre: Una ragazza della Resistenza a una ragazza di oggi

Toward the end of her ninth decade, Marisa Ombra composed an extended essay to a girl of 14, whom she had known from birth, after bumping into her dog Ettore (actually, the other way around) in the...

Rough-and-Tumble World: Men Writing about Gender and War

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 523 pages.

Nuclear Abolition or Nuclear Umbrella? Choices and Contradictions in US Proposals

40.00 cloth.

Paradoxes of Violence and Self-determination

This chapter discusses military strategy in a world beyond deterrence, analysing the choices and contradictions in US proposals about nuclear abolition and its commitments to extended deterrence. In the analysis, strong emphasis is placed on the normative context for nuclear disarmament, which would greatly benefit from an explicit and unqualified condemnation of those weapons by world’s leaders. To that end, popular mobilization is deemed as a prerequisite for such significant change.

The Five Hundred Years' Argument

Abstract Secessionist movements aspiring to statehood often resort to force if their demands are not met peacefully. Indeed a political community’s ability to maintain internal order and external defence by military means is a fundamental attribute of the nation-state. Yet international law limits the use of force to self-defence. Is non-violent secessionism, then, an oxymoron, and violent secessionism illegal? The late twentieth-century witnessed successful cases of non-violent secession—along with nearly successful ones, ones whose success we might now judge to have been short-lived, ones whose commitment to non-violence was short-lived, and ones whose efforts provoked massacres and foreign intervention. This essay reviews examples of each to identify paradoxes that emerge when movements for national self-determination depend on violence for their success. It does so in the context of Just War Theory, and particularly Michael Walzer’s influential formulation.

Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War

Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention. By Neta C Crawford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 466 pp.,

Innovation and the arms race : how the United States and the Soviet Union develop new military technologies

85.00 cloth (ISBN 0-521-80244-X),

The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union?

30.00 paper (ISBN 0-521-00279-6). The end of the Cold War witnessed an impressive growth in the study of the impact of norms on international and domestic politics. The subject matter of the new work typically involved issues that had previously been the provenance of normative philosophers and international lawyers. Issues connected to just war theory and international humanitarian law, such as inhumane weapons and military intervention, received considerable attention (Price 1997; Tannenwald 1999). The broad category of human rights (womens suffrage, antislavery movements, torture, democratization) also figured prominently (Nadelmann 1990; Ron 1997; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Kaufmann and Pape 1999; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). The focus on such issues in the new scholarship often seemed driven by ethical concerns, but the methods for studying them were fairly conventional and empirical rather than normative. The main innovations came in the theoretical realm, as students of normative change found traditional realist and institutionalist approaches (usually linked under the rubric “rationalist” or “materialist”) lacking in explanatory power. Thus, much of the new work on norms developed constructivist theoretical frameworks and pitted them against rationalist accounts, sometimes finding that a combination of approaches worked best (Katzenstein 1996; Checkel 1997; Thomas 2001). In parallel with the mainly North American constructivist study of norms, a group of German scholars was drawing upon the work of political theorist Jurgen Habermas to produce valuable insights into the effect of “communicative action” on international politics. A number of intrepid bridge-builders have sought to integrate the Habermasian work on argument and persuasion with mainstream constructivist and rationalist approaches, often with promising results (Risse 2000; Checkel 2001; Schimmelfennig 2001). Now, with the publication of Neta Crawfords Argument and Change in World Politics , we have a work that makes a major theoretical advance in …