1,720,958 research outputs found
Can States Be Interviewed? [Elektronisk resurs]
No full textWhile states are not human beings, they are institutionalized social groups. It is humans who constitute and run them. Consequently, it is argued that countries can be interviewed. This claim is based on in-depth interviews with seventy Israeli and British officials, which “captured” states’ anxiety. In ontological security studies, countries’ anxieties are typically inferred from historical and narrative analysis. The article lays another path to establish that states are anxious. Despite the increasing acknowledgement of the “emotional turn” in international relations, there is a notable lack of methodological focus on how emotions impact statecraft. This study bridges the gap by showing how interviewing can investigate the internal lives of states. The research also addresses critiques of ontological security studies, namely the challenge of applying an individual-level concept to state behavior and empirically validating its relevance in statecraft. It traced how officials’ anxiety about their country’s policies “scales up” to the state level. The rich evidence—coming from country officials themselves—affirmed ontological security’s capacity to explain state behavior and underscored the importance of integrating political psychology into international relations research. Moreover, it is the first study to use elite interviews to investigate whether countries experience ontological insecurity.</p
Talking to the State: Interviewing the Elites about What’s Not to Be Said
No full textHow can researchers conduct interviews about sensitive topicsthe interlocutors are unwilling to discuss? This article contributes to theongoing debates on interviewing. While we are observing a growing in-terest in this research method among international relations scholars,we lack formalized advanced practices for overcoming interview-relatedchallenges. Drawing on elite interviews conducted in Israel and the UK,the article introduces two research techniques particularly useful in dis-cussing controversial or sensitive matters: in-situ texts and adaptable self-presentation practices. It first presents the types of challenges I faced seek-ing answers as to why secure and powerful states like the UK and Israel em-ploy narratives of vulnerability in wartime public communication. Then itanalyses how the use of in-situ texts during interviews assists in introducingsensitive topics into the interview. I illustrate how they allow me to quicklyestablish the importance of the research phenomenon as well as to facili-tate more open conversations. Finally, I show the benefits of the adaptableself-presentation technique. The goal of this practice is to conduct a re-sponsive interview. One in which the researcher builds trust with the par-ticipant by bringing out its own biographical aspects that emphasize eitherits outsider or insider status
The vulnerability of securitisation: the missing link of critical security studies
No full textThis article proposes to focus on vulnerability in the operationalisation of securitisation theory. It argues that in empirical investigations we often fail to acknowledge that security acts may reflect weakness, not strength. Employing second-generation securitisation research, it first problematizes the common approach to securitisation. Namely, that the self-referential conceptualisation of security acts, together with the realist understanding of power, lead to interpretations of securitisation as a tool of unprincipled statecraft. Secondly, drawing on Brown’s work on border walling, the article reasons that securitisation is predicated on vulnerability. Vulnerability is a legitimising necessity of securitisation. One cannot designate a threat without tying it to vulnerability (real/imagined). Securitisations are essentially claims of vulnerability. Thirdly, utilising contextual and narrative analysis of two case studies, this paper illustrates how securitisations are coupled with vulnerability. The article formalizes a generative research avenue of securitisation. One that better accounts for the intersubjective aspects of security acts
Anxious Leviathan: The Powerful Vulnerability of Strong States
No full textWhy do strong countries implement narratives of vulnerability in their wartime public communication? This dissertation solves the puzzling practice of powerful actors pursuing identifications we commonly associate with weakness and political failure. It is the first systematic study analyzing vulnerability narratives as a practice of statecraft and warcraft. I compare the politics of vulnerability of Israel and the UK during two conflicts: Israel's 2014 Operation Protective Edge (OPE) and the UK's participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I combine the analysis of states' wartime public communication with in-depth interviews with 32 British and 38 Israeli officials.
Using identity as an analytical starting point to theorise about the states' behaviour, I expose the rationale behind actors' vulnerability narratives. I show that both conflicts were a source of ontological insecurity and that actors presented themselves as insecure to avoid negative evaluations of fighting against the underdog. In the case of strong actors, vulnerability narratives have two functions. One, they reduce anxiety about the actor's identity. Warfare against a weaker opponent erodes positive self-perceptions of the powerful state. By self-identifying as vulnerable, the country's action gains a principled meaning which supports its ontological security. Second, vulnerability narratives provide the state with a special agency. By presenting itself as vulnerable, the state securitises a weaker opponent to justify offensive action.
The dissertation contributes to socio-psychological studies of conflict by showing that vulnerability is a conflict-supportive identification not only for the collectives but also for the states. Validating previous experimental research conducted on an individual and group level, it provides empirical data that vulnerability self-identifications may also be a source of legitimacy on the state level. It is an innovative study of how states introduce vulnerability self-identifications to the collective. Israel and the UK have based their communication on a multiplicity of in/outgroup vulnerability narratives. This finding broadens socio-psychological scholarship on vulnerability by showing that states' try to evoke vulnerability self-perceptions not only by referring to the in-group's but also outgroup's standing.
The dissertation contributes to the ontological security studies. It lays out a new research avenue for the study of the resilience of identity. This approach recognizes that states adapt their autobiographies to their evolving behaviour and ideational needs. Furthermore, that the state's identity can be protected from criticisms of its actions. Applying the sociology of trust, I show that vulnerability narratives may be used as a trust-inducing mechanism. This allows us to read anew the political role of vulnerability where - contrary to the traditional approach - vulnerability may be a bulwark of ontological security. While it is broadly recognized that ontological security is a key source of political agency, major studies focus on routines and inhibiting functions the identity has over the behaviour of states. The recognition of the resilience of Israel's and the UK's identity - in a time of controversial armed conflicts with much weaker opponents - allows us to decouple states' routines from states' agency by accounting for the ability to sustain their sense of self and adapt to change. The dissertation sheds new light on what constitutes a crisis of ontological security. While in the literature, states' behaviour was foremost studied from the perspective of external challenges to their identity, in both case studies it was the actions of states themselves that challenged their ontological security. The dissertation investigates the researcher's interpretation of the state's anxiety with the country's officials themselves. So far, no inquiries have employed interviews to study the role ontological security plays in state actions. Little attention has been also paid to the ways of establishing that a country is dealing with anxiety. Generally, such claims are based on discourse and historical analysis. By investigating how country officials pursued the safe identity of the state, this dissertation offers granular evidence of the ways through which actors seek ontological security. Furthermore, while the literature explains why conflicts may be supportive of ontological security, it abstracts from systematically analysing how states may support the safety of their identity while pursuing military confrontation. The study exposes the use of vulnerability narratives as such practice.
Lastly, the dissertation contributes to the scholarship that links ontological security with securitisation by showing that securitisations can be used to protect identity from negative evaluations of state actions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe 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
No full text“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
No full textWe 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
No full textWe 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
- …
