International Relations: Key Concepts

• These materials discuss key concepts in international relations, nationalism, managing military conflict, norms and international law, and human rights and advocacy networks.

International Relations as a Science

• International relations studies the interactions between actors, structures, and processes in the international system.
• It seeks to understand why states and people cooperate or conflict.
• Key issues examined include war, peace, the global economy, global inequalities, and freedoms.
• The academic study of international relations rigorously applies concepts, theories, and methods to understand international politics.
• The goals are to describe, explain, predict, and prescribe in international politics.
• Explanatory theories aim to explain outcomes, and theoreis are simplifications of complex reality.
• Theories lead to testable hypotheses, which are assessed using empirical data.
• Empirical data is information from observation or experimentation.
• The ultimate goal is to apply the scientific method to world politics, but individuals, groups, and states are complex, and experimentation is often impossible.
• The hope is to generate claims increasing or decreasing the likelihood of some outcome, which can then be used to inform policymaking.
• Key areas of inquiry include deterrence, democratic peace, trade, war, and open economies.

Levels of Analysis in International Relations

• The level of analysis refers to where the causes of international outcomes are examined.
• Three levels: the international system, the state, and the individual.
• Different levels of analysis clarify how different kinds of questions are answered.
• Levels place emphasis on the importance of agency(actors) versus structure(rules) in international affairs.
• Agency refers to the capacity of actors to shape society, while structure are the factors that influence or constrain choices.
• Actors shape their own social context, and that context shapes the actors, creating a mutually constitutive relationship.

Sovereignty and Anarchy

• Sovereignty means states generally have legal and political supremacy within their borders.
• This includes a monopoly on the use of force, territorial integrity, and control over domestic policies.
• Anarchy refers to the absence of a central authority above states.
• State sovereignty leads to anarchy in the international system because there is no world government.
• Anarchy does not mean chaos, but rather that there is no legal authority to enforce agreements.

Collective Action Problems

• Obstacles to cooperation occur due to actors acting rationally and in self-interest.
• Actors act with expectation that others will pay the costs of cooperation
• Actors have incentives to collaborate, but expect others to pay the costs, leading to under-provision of public goods.
• Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
• Free riding is benefiting from a public good without contributing to it.

Institutions

• Institutions are sets of rules that structure interactions and relations among actors.
• They help mitigate the uncertainty related to anarchy.
• Institutions promote positive cooperation and peace and serve to:
• Reduce decision-making costs
• Set behavior standards
• Reinforce reciprocity
• Increase transparency
• Verify compliance
• Institutions reduce uncertainty and transaction costs.

Strategic Interaction

• Strategic interaction involves actors anticipating others' choices when making their own.
• Actions are purposive and contingent.
• The material focuses on cooperation and bargaining.
• Game theory refresher:
• Actors must choose strategies that are a best response to the anticipated actions of the other actor
• When an actor makes the same choice regardless of opposition, it is a dominant strategy.
• The result of each side playing their best response strategy is called an equilibrium.
• In an equilibrium, actors have no incentive to unilaterally change their choice.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

• Two criminals are arrested.
• If neither testifies, both are charged with a misdemeanor (one year).
• Testifying against the other yields freedom, while the accomplice gets ten years.
• If both testify, then each get five years for testifying.
• Cooperation is no losses, while bargaining is gaining + losing, and Rather than equal sharing of benefits, they are just gaining.

Nationalism and International Politics

• Nationalism asserts that the political and national unit should be congruent.
• Loyalty to a nation is a central political identity for the individual.
• Nations are tied to territory and are imagined political communities.
• Nationalism is a propensity to align individual self-interest with that of the nation.
• Group interests are defined by a shared culture and history, including a belief in a common destiny and pride with a view of superiority.
• Groups desire their own state structure for survival.
• National self-determination suggests groups should have their own states.
• Secession is leaving a state to form a new one.
• Irredentism is leaving to join another state.

Origins of Nationalist Sentiment

• Primordialists see national identities as natural.
• Perennialists see them as built on pre-existing ethnic and cultural blocks.
• Modernists see nationalism as a product of modernization, industrialization, print capitalism, and modern warfare.
• Nationalism arose due to the transition to industrial society which required cultural homogeneity.
• It stems from print capitalism which made imagined language communities possible.
• Nationalism is fostered by states to improve military capabilities, and nationalist sentiment redefined the "state" as the nation-state.
• From the mid-1600s, the Westphalian system included the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention.
• Nationalist challenges in the peripheries of European empires were important.
• Post WWII saw decolonization.
• The Soviet Union's collapse led to new nationalist movements with nations emerging peacefully(Czechoslovakia) and with violent confrontations. (ethnic nationalism)
• Nation-states emerge with a weakened old regime.
• There has been a recent resurgence of nationalism, especially against globalism..

Managing Military Conflict

• Wars between states are costly, resulting in death, injury, displacement, destruction, and financial burden.
• Civil wars devastate societies, and inflict long-terms economic damage years after the conflict.
• Alliances are institutions facilitating military cooperation with rules guiding behavior.
• They form when states have bargaining interests against an adversary and specify standards and expectations to define what is right and wrong and what is to be done in a conflict.
• Alliances can be defensive, offensive, or both, and codify bargains over contributions and distribution.
• Alliances ensure a balance of power, which is when the military capabilities of two groups of states are roughly equal. - Alliances entail a commitment, and a willingness to act even if defeat is likely.
• Alliances limit freedom, and there is a risk an ally can cause crisis to be avoided.
• Bandwagoning occurs when losing or weak states join the stronger state or coalition to share in the spoils of conquest.
• Offensive alliances may increase conflicts, but defensive ones deter militarized actions.

Collective Security Organizations

• Collective security organizations are international institutions promoting peace and security.
• Examples being, the League of Nations and the UN, which form when states accept that security is the concern of all.
• Ideally, they are conceived as global in their scope. , with the more broad scope they include, the more successful they will be.
• Internally, they forbid force by one member against another. Externally, there is a collective response to attack.
• Collective security organizations can respond with:
• Economic sanctions
• Military intervention
• Mediators/peacekeepers
• Challenges to the status quo are certain to fail, there is help to enforce agreements, and they serve as neutral observers.
• There is a challenge of creating a collective action, since all states expect each state to pay the costs of corporation.

The United Nations

• The UN Security Council has the authority to identify international threats.
• It decides on responses and can authorize economic and military sanctions.
• There are 5 permanent members with power to prevent the passage of a measure at the Security Council-- the ability to prevent a measure unilaterally.
• The UN Security Consul is made up of the US, Britain, France, Russia, and China.
• 9 of 15 council members are needed to pass a vote.
• The UN can authorize two types of military operations, peacekeeping and peace enforcement.
• Peacekeeping is troops, polices, or observers to monitor ceasefires
• Key peacekeeping principles are: - Consent of the warring parties
• Impartiality
• Non-use of force unless in self-defense of a mission's mandate
• Peace enforcement means enforcement using military force.
• UN peacekeeping reduces the probability of cease-fire breakdown.
• Deployments reduce violence by resolving commitment issues and increasing the costs of continued fighting, but member states aren't always compelled.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

• Emerged in light of failures such as the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre.
• R2P is a norm to prevent violence and persecution, including genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
• States protect their citizens and if not willing or able it is transferred to the international community.

Norms and International Law

• Norms are "a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity," and shape and can constrain behavior. (states)
• Logic of appropriateness sees actors conforming not for instrumental reasons, but because they see the behavior as "good."

Three Types of Norms:

• Constitutive norms - who is a legitimate actor
• Procedural norms - how decisions should be made
• Regulative norms - what behavior is appropriate

The Norm Life Cycle consists of:

• Emergence(Norm Building)
• Norm entrepreneurs convince others to make issues new.
• Organizational platforms promote norms.
• Cascade
• States adopt because of legitimacy, concern and conformity.
• Internalization
• Violating norms = shame and once internalized, a new actor interest or “payoff function” is changed.

Why Norms Matter

• State behavior is altered by promotions of new activist led norms.
• Transgressions are associated with potential reputational costs and are called out publicly through "naming and shaming." Shaming can lead to:
• Sanctions
• Loss of cooperation.
• Domestic instability.
• They can define state interests and change interactions.

International Law

• A body of rules that binds states and other agents in world politics, it's considered to have the status of law.
• Made up of primary or secondary rules
• Primary - What you can or cannot do
• Secondary- How the rules are made
• International laws clarify state obligations.
• Defines violations that are subject to punishment.
• Provides for independent tribunals.
• In effect reducing uncertainties and transaction costs.

Types of International Law

• Customary international law develops over time as states recognize practices as legal obligations.
• Conventions and treaties are explicitly negotiated, bargained over, and then ratified.
• International law varies in terms of obligation, precision, and delegation,
• There is hard law (obligatory, precise, delegates substantial authority to third parties) and soft law(aspirational, ambiguous, and does not delegate much).

International Norms and Law

Shape state behavior.

• International law facilitates interstate cooperation.

Human Rights

• The development if human rights was a result of the Second World War.
• Human rights are those possessed by all, regardless of status, and while abstract, have a large daily life impact.
• There are three historical trends that led to greater international human rights, the trend the democratization, accountability in internal law, and growth of international civil society.
• Democratization - institutions of free speech
• Accountability - monitor reporting trade
• WW2, the atrocities that occurred turned toward the development of these rights.
• The question of how well the human rights would be ensconced from a postwar period was central to the discussions of framing UN.
• The UN was interpreted to have nearly an immediate response to Nazi terrors.

UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Proclaimed by UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948

• Consists of 30 diverse sets of rights that are posses by all.
• Soft Law institution.

International Cooperation

Broke due to soviet tensions, but in the end the cooperation was the production of the international Covenant Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and international Covenant on economics Social & Rights (ICESCR) • - Consists of 174 member counties party to the ICCPR.

• Together ICCPR/ICESCR make up the International Bill of Rights, and are to be believed to be the heart of international human rights regime. • The different tensions high that human rights aren't always wanted to be the same in the USSR.
• Asian Values - elevates goals of commonness.

• Different things this debate demonstrates consist of rights to human struggle/social interest human rights themselves aren't internalized.

• Sanctions due rights are rare. Individuals start acting once the law is inflicted.
• States violate human rights due to; preserving their regime, and acting of security.

TAN (Transnational Advocacy Networks)

Consist of; NGO, churches , individuals. which coordinate activities around global issues. Many issues have had a TAN impact, especially politically. influencing states of power. Can be used to exert political pressure, power info. They can also make governments known they're beings monitored.

Explore key concepts in international relations, including the interactions between actors and structures in the international system. Understand the dynamics of cooperation and conflict among states and people. Examine war, peace, global economy, and human rights.