Determinants of international cooperation : reciprocity, opportunity, and cooperative norms

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jeremy Bowling

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation examines few of the determinants and effects of international cooperation. There are three broad themes that run throughout this dissertation, which are the ideas of reciprocity, opportunity, and cooperative norms. Reciprocity is a large part of the development of cooperation theory, particularly in the study of the evolution of cooperation. While it is mentioned across international relations scholarship, empirical testing of its existence in international politics is scarce. Opportunity is a ubiquitous concept across social science. The concept is used in this dissertation as a challenge to the notion that cooperation reduces the likelihood of conflict, which pervades the study of international conflict, particularly from those that study conflict from the theory of liberalism. Lastly, an exploratory analysis of cooperative norms is examined. Studying the social construction of cooperative norms is important for the broader study of international cooperation. I find that direct and indirect reciprocity are important indicators of cooperation, cooperation will increase the likelihood and severity of dyadic conflict unless both states are highly cooperative with each other, and domestic political institutions may be important for the development of cooperative norms that extend to the international level. Overall, international relations scholars should reexamine how cooperation in viewed and studied, particularly in relation to conflict.

Author(s):  
J. Samuel Barkin ◽  
Laura Sjoberg

The chapter discusses various ways that constructivism might be defined, and finds in them a tendency to make constructivisms into at once more than they are (by imbuing them with “naturally” associated politics) and less (by divorcing them from their roots as social theory). The chapter builds an argument that what constructivisms have in common is the ontological assumption of the social construction of international politics as expressed in methodology for doing International Relations research. This assumption should not be understood as taking specific ontologies, let alone methods, methodologies, or politics, as definitional of constructivism. Work can reasonably be described as constructivist if it builds on an ontology of co-constitution and intersubjectivity in the context of a particular set of methodological claims underlying a research exercise about global politics. This brackets what work might be called constructivist but does not associate constructivism either with any specific ontology or with any specific methodology.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 266-267
Author(s):  
Cynthia Weber

Conceptualizing the sovereign nation-state remains a core concern in the discipline of international relations (IR). Yet, as the volumes by Sarah Owen Vandersluis and Beate Jahn demonstrate, the theoretical location of this conceptual debate is shifting. Questions of identity, like those regarding sovereign nation-states, were answered in the 1990s with reference to terms like social construction. In the new millennium, “the social” is increasingly joined by “the cultural” as an intellectual marker of how serious IR scholars must pose questions of identity. Why this shift? And what difference does it make to our understandings of sovereign nation-states, not to mention IR theory more generally?


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Alfeetouri Salih Mohammed Alsati ◽  
Al-Sayed Abd ulmutallab Ghanem

The current research aims at identifying and measuring the political knowledge of the students of the two universities of Al- Balqaa in Jordan and Omar Al- Mokhtar in Libya. The two communities are almost similar in terms of the social formation, Arab customs and traditions, the Bedouin values, the difference in the institutional age and the political stability.The study attempts to measure and compare the political knowledge in the communities of the two universities using the descriptive and comparative analytical method. The study uses a 400 random questionnaire of 30 paragraphs to measure eight indicators divided into internal and external political knowledge, and other aspects of knowledge: general political knowledge, knowledge of the political institutions and leaders, the political interest, the geographical and historical knowledge, and knowledge of the methods of exercising the political process. The study also attempts to identifying the most important sources and the role of the university in university students’ political knowledge.The results show that the level of the political knowledge is medium while its level in the sample of the Jordanian students is high. According to the samples, the internal political knowledge is more than the external knowledge with a lack of interest in the political matters. The samples do not consider the political matters as their priorities. The political knowledge as a whole needs to much effort to be exerted to confront the current circumstances. The variables of the place of resident, age and the educational level make big difference in the political knowledge. In contrast, the level of the parental education does not create big differences.


Author(s):  
Sandra Halperin ◽  
Oliver Heath

This chapter discusses the principles of ethnography and participant observation: what they are, how (if) they became standardized as a research method, what form of evidence they constitute, and what place they occupy in the study of Politics. Participant observation has emerged as a popular research tool across the social sciences. In particular, political ethnographies are now widely carried out in a wide variety of contexts, from the study of political institutions and organizations to the investigation of social movements and informal networks, such as terrorist groups and drugs cartels. Political ethnography is also becoming a research method of choice in the field of International Relations. The chapter examines the strengths of ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on issues relating to sampling, access, key informants, and collecting observational data. It also addresses the weaknesses of ethnography, especially issues of subjectivity, reliability, and generalizability.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ana Zapata-Calle

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] My Ph.D thesis, entitled "The Womanist Testimonial Poetry Written by Excilia Saldana, Nancy Morejon and Georgina Herrera," is a post-colonial, sociological, and historiographical analysis of the testimonial poetry written by three Afro-Cuban women poets. The theoretical framework applied is the social theory of womanism from Kemberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins and Clenora Hudson-Weens, among others. This theory received its name from Alice Walker, who proposed it for the first time in her book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983), and fills a gap that previously existed between western feminism and ethnic studies. The poems of these three authors describe not only the simultaneous oppression of gender and race that the Afro-Cuban women suffer within their society, but also celebrate the tradition, history, beauty, spirituality, arts and accomplishments of black women as a collective and cultural group. Thus, Excilia Saldana's, Nancy Morejon's and Georgina Herrera's work emerge from a different perspective than the poetry of Nicolas Guillen and the testimonial novel of Miguel Barnet, which had previously provided the main Afro-Cuban representation in the literary canon of the twentieth century. In particular, these three poets write from the female gender approach and about the social reality of Afro-Cuban peoples in the contemporary historical period. The dissertation is composed of an introduction, three chapters, one for each writer, and a conclusion. The first chapter is about Excilia Saldana's poems "Mi Nombre (Antielegia familiar)" and "Monologo de la esposa". Her work portrays a society full of violence and contradictions that causes the fragmentation of the black woman's identity. The phenomena of alienation, endoracism, gender and racial oppression, as well as the sexual trade in Cuba, are included in the analysis. The writer uses her poetry to ask for respect for the Afro-Cuban woman, considering her as a full human being and citizen. The s


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Roslyn Fraser Schoen

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation is about the lives of women and girls during a period of economic and demographic change in rural Bangladesh. This bulk of this change, often referred to as economic development, occurs at the intersection of social and economic institutions at a time when agricultural modes of production are being replaced by wage labor within a globalizing labor market. The lived experiences of this change are structured by family and kinship arrangements, ideology, history, tradition, and deeply-internalized gender norms. The purpose of this research is to document via ethnographic methods several important local effects of the shift to a wage-based economic mode from the perspective of women in terms of their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lawrence Loiseau

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This study addresses Lacan's comments on Marx. While much has been done towards reading Marx with psychoanalysis generally, little had has been done to unpack the meaning and extent of Lacan's own statements on Marx. For example, while Lacanian Marxists like Slavoj Zizek have wielded Lacan to great effect in a critique of post-structuralism, they have neglected the full meaning and complexity of Lacan's own stance. What is argued thereby is that Zizek not only omits the discrete knowledge within Lacan's commentary, but misses what I describe as a Lacan's theory of the social. On the one hand, it is commonly known in Lacanian thought that discourse is responsible for making the subject. On the other hand, what is less known is that Lacan defined discourse as that which makes a social link which, in contrast with Marxist thought, introduces a certain affect and materialism premised on discourse itself, commonly known, but also for providing the underlying strata of topology (namely, paradox) requisite for making any social link between subjects. Although less commonly known, we can nevertheless gain new insight into Marx. On the one hand, Lacan concedes Marx's underlying structuralism. On the other hand, Marx fails to see the true source of discourse's origins, the real itself, and consequently fails to see the true efficacy of discourse. He fails to see how discourse, although negative, stands as entirely positive and material in its distinctive effects. Discourse negotiates subjects and their inimitable objects of desire in this singularity itself. This is where true production lies; it is that which precedes any social or economic theory, which are otherwise premised on reality. Lacan rejects reality.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Krisztina A. Pusok

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] While the role of firms has been acknowledged in existent research in political economy, it has played a rather peripheral role in the study of environmental politics, specifically in understanding environmental governance. In this dissertation, I seek to identify what the role of the private sector is in pushing the global environmental agenda. Specifically, I seek to offer alternative explanations for why firms choose to form these regimes, by drawing on existent comparative and international relations literatures focusing on political economy, governance, and the role of non-state actors. Additionally, I discuss the conditions determining firms to form private environmental regimes, as well as the economic and political consequences of this growing dynamic. Lastly, I investigate the mechanisms tying together different actors in terms of their environmental governance interactions.


Author(s):  
Alexander Bukh

This chapter summarizes the findings of this book. It draws a number of conclusions regarding the factors that spur the emergence of territorial disputes—related national identity entrepreneurship, and analyzes the factors that account for the difference in the social reception of the narratives in the respective societies. It also outlines the implications of these case studies for our understanding of the social construction of a disputed territory and for the broader constructivist International Relations literature on national identity.


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