1,720,964 research outputs found
Offensive ideas: structural realism, classical realism and Putin's war on Ukraine
Full text linkControversy has surrounded realist explanations of the causes of Russia's war against Ukraine, particularly John Mearsheimer's charge of western responsibility. The article illustrates the variety of realist analyses of Russia's war on Ukraine, contesting the caricaturized view that blames the West, or NATO enlargement, for the conflict.Controversy has surrounded realist explanations of the causes of Russia's war against Ukraine, particularly John Mearsheimer's charge of western responsibility. This article seeks to clarify and contextualize his argument, situating it within the broader paradigm. Realism, and even its narrower offensive sub-school, offers a wide range of contrasting interpretations, depending on which major actors are studied and what characteristics they are endowed with. Like its classical predecessor, structural realism is premised on implicit views of human nature. In an effort to explicate some of these assumptions about the behavioural micro-foundations of states and their leaders, the article investigates main components of structural theory-including power differentials, 'rational' interests and states as unitary actors-and connects these concepts to base emotions like fear and anger. It argues that realists do well to differentiate between the aspirations of states and individual leaders' quest for power and status. In the same vein, reference to Russian security concerns may be emblematic of elites' perceived challenges of cultural subordination, and Putin's personal fears for the stability of his regime. Engagement with realist thought is essential, in part because of its continuing influence on policy-making (particularly in Russia) and in order to forestall improper co-option of caricaturized versions of realist arguments
Theory of Irrational Politics: Classical Realist Lessons on Foreign Policy Analysis
No full textThis article argues that efforts to strengthen the theoretical foundations for foreign policy analysis (FPA) should take as a vantage point the smallest social unit-the human being. It advocates far-reaching engagement with psychology and the life sciences for insights on the individual in the social context. Research on emotion, as a general human phenomenon and one that has been extensively researched across disciplines, is thought to offer a particularly promising conceptual lens on foreign policy. For cues on how to incorporate scientific findings with historical analysis and situate resulting hypotheses in relation to prevailing theoretical paradigms, the article draws on classical realism. Especially mid-twentieth century realists such as Hans Morgenthau expressed a nuanced conception of human agency and the interplay between emotion and cognition. Substantial aspects of their theories, based largely on experience and intuition, have been corroborated by recent scientific research. This review is structured around four central issues. These have been both the loci of much criticism levelled at classical realism and remain a challenge to IR as a whole: the levels of analysis problem, the "scaling up" of emotion, the classification and choice of emotion(s), and the accessibility of the political world to scientific method
Hooked on a Feeling: Russia's Annexation of Crimea Through the Lens of Emotion
Full text linkThis article tests the plausibility of an affect-centered framework for foreign policy analysis, using the 2014 annexation of Crimea as an illustrative case. It identifies questions left open by prevailing accounts based on international relations theory and shows how a supplementary conceptual lens can improve existing explanations. The affective perspective suggests that the Russian president deemed intervention in Ukraine without alternative. Otherwise, Russia would have surrendered any claim to relevance in European security. More saliently, the ouster of Yanukovych, as a possible precedent for Russia, frightened Putin and increased his resolve to take action. Also, contrary to the interpretation of the annexation as an improvised reaction to a political crisis, evidence suggests that the Russian elite welcomed the opportunity to break free from uncomfortable partnership dynamics with the West
Bored enough yet? International order, ideology, and what it takes to get history started again
No full textOrder needs an ideational foundation that provides it with legitimacy. Most scholars writing on international order, though they employ fundamentally different approaches and intellectual histories, appear to agree on this. This book review essay contrasts some of these different perspectives. It reviews Francis Fukuyama's eminent The end of history and the last man and asks what it can tell us about the ideational and psychological conditions underlying change in the international order. This discussion is integrated with a review of three more recent works on order formation and change: Richard Haass focuses on the distribution of material power, Barry Buzan and George Lawson discuss the transformational impact of the nineteenth century on international relations and Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman look at the relationship between divergence of polity forms and order. I argue that the post-Second World War order, which rests on liberal democracy as the consensually agreed on ideational foundation, remains firmly in place-despite challenges from nationalism, authoritarianism or religious fanaticism. However, there are three ways in which a new order could be brought about: power shifts leading to hegemonic war, wild cards or the emergence of a new ideational foundation that poses a feasible alternative to liberal democracy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
