This article discusses: the doctrinal content of the group of ideas known as ‘new public management’(NPM); the intellectual provenance of those ideas; explanations for their apparent persuasiveness in the 1980 s; and criticisms which have been made of the new doctrines. Particular attention is paid to the claim that NPM offers an all-purpose key to better provision of public services. This article argues that NFM has been most commonly criticized in terms of a claimed contradiction between ‘equity’ and ‘efficiency’ values, but that any critique which is to survive NPM's claim to ‘infinite reprogrammability’ must be couched in terms of possible conflicts between administrative values. The conclusion is that the ESRC'S Management in Government’ research initiative has been more valuable in helping to identify rather than to definitively answer, the key conceptual questions raised by NPM.

A public management for all seasons

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

The debate between realists and liberals has reemerged as an axis of contention in international relations theory.’ Revolving in the past around competing theories of human nature, the debate is more concerned today with the extent to which state action is influenced by ‘structure’ (anarchy and the distribution of power) versus ‘process’ (interaction and learning) and institutions. Does the absence of centralized political authority force states to play competitive power politics? Can international regimes overcome this logic, and under what conditions? What in anarchy is given and immutable, and what is amenable to change?

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Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Twenty years ago, in the pages of the, Journal of Common Market Studies, Hedley Bull launched a searing critique of the European Community's "civilian power" in international affairs. Since that time the increasing role of the European Union (EU) in areas of security and defence policy has led to a seductiveness in adopting the notion of "military power Europe". In contrast, I will attempt to argue that by thinking beyond traditional conceptions of the EU's international role and examining the case study of its international pursuit of the abolition of the death penalty, we may best conceive of the EU as a "normative power Europe".

Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?

Security Analysis: Conceptual Apparatus The Military Sector The Environmental Sector The Economic Sector The Societal Sector The Political Sector How Sectors are Synthesized by Actors.

Security: A New Framework for Analysis

Part I. Introduction: Developing a Regional Approach to Global Security: 1. Theories and histories about the structure of contemporary international security 2. Levels: distinguishing the regional from the global 3. Security complexes: a theory of regional security Part II. Asia: 4. South Asia: inching towards internal and external transformation 5. Northeast and southeast Asian security complexes during the Cold War 6. The 1990s and beyond: an emergent east Asian complex Conclusion Part III. The Middle East and Africa: Introduction 7. The Middle East: a perennial conflict formation 8. Sub-saharan Africa: security dynamics in a setting of weak and failed states Conclusions Part IV. The Americas: 9. North America: the sole superpower and its surroundings 10. South America: an under-conflictual anomaly? Conclusion: scenarios for the RSCs of the Americas Part V. The Europes: Introduction: 11. EU-Europe: the European Union and its 'near abroad' 12. The Balkans and Turkey 13. The post-Soviet space: a regional security complex around Russia Conclusion: scenarios for the European supercomplex Part VI. Conclusions: 14. Regions and powers: summing up and looking ahead 15. Reflections on conceptualising international security.

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/3437/1/75.pdf

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security

The second edition of this widely acclaimed book takes as its main theme the question of how states and societies pursue freedom from threat in an environment in which competitive relations are inescapable across the political, economic, military, societal and environmental landscapes. Throughout, attention is placed on the interplay of threats and vulnerabilities, the policy consequences of overemphasising one or the other, and the existence of contradictions within and between ideas about security. Barry Buzan argues that the concept of security is a versatile, penetrating and useful way to approach the study of international relations. Security provides an analytical framework which stands between the extremes of power and peace, incorporates most of their insights and adds more of its own.People, States and Fear. Is essential reading for all students and researchers of international politics and security studies. The ECPR Classics edition includes a new introduction from the author placing this classic text within a current context.

People, states and fear: an agenda for international security studies in the post-Cold War era

The Mind Map Book

This book argues that threats to ethno-national identity are replacing military concerns as the central focus of European insecurity. In Western Europe societal insecurity has replaced state sovereignty as the key to success or failure of European integration pushing concerns about identity and migration to the top of the political agenda and profoundly dividing peoples from their leaderships. In the East national identity has become the mainspring of post-Soviet political reorganisation raising a host of boundary and minority problems. The interplay of these societal insecurities in West and East will determine both the political shape and stability of Europe for the next generation as well as the future of Europes relations with its Islamic periphery. (EXCERPT)

Barry Buzan

Papers

Security: A New Framework for Analysis

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security

People, states and fear: an agenda for international security studies in the post-Cold War era

The Mind Map Book

Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe