Thanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues against this conventional interpretation of politics, one that takes for granted that we live in a world of facts and that people react rationally to the facts they know. In doing so, he explores in detail the ways in which the conspicuous aspects of the political scene are interpretations that systematically buttress established inequalities and interpretations already dominant political ideologies.

Constructing the Political Spectacle

IN the last decade deliberative democracy has developed rapidly from a “theoretical statement” into a “working theory.” Scholars and practitioners have launched numerous initiatives designed to put deliberative democracy into practice, ranging from deliberative polling to citizen summits. Some even advocate deliberation as a new “revolutionary political ideal . . . about how political actors should behave here and now.” Deliberative democracy has also experienced the beginning of an empirical turn, making significant gains as an empirical (or positive) political science. This includes a small, but growing body of literature tackling the connection between the normative standards of deliberation, how well they are met, and the empirical consequences of meeting them. This trend has, for instance, included the use of methods and frameworks borrowed from other fields, such as political and social psychology. Such studies suggest that cases approaching ideal deliberation are rare, but that group interaction sometimes works surprisingly well according to such ideals.

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Disentangling Diversity in Deliberative Democracy: Competing Theories, their Blind Spots, and Complementarities

The status of international law and transnational legal agreements with respect to the sovereignty claims of liberal democracies has become a highly contentious theoretical and political issue. Although recent European discussions focus on global constitutionalism, there is increasing reticence on the part of many that prospects of a world constitution are neither desirable nor salutary. This article more closely considers criticisms of these legal transformations by distinguishing the nationalist from democratic sovereigntiste positions, and both, from diagnoses that see the universalization of human rights norms either as the Trojan horse of a global empire or as neocolonialist intentions to assert imperial control over the world. These critics ignore “the jurisgenerativity of law.” Although democratic sovereigntistes are wrong in minimizing how human rights norms improve democratic self-rule; global constitutionalists are also wrong in minimizing the extent to which cosmopolitan norms require local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples.

Claiming Rights across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.

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Critical methods in International Relations: The politics of techniques, devices and acts

Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit : Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik

Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union (EU) has undergone significant changes. Once a model “Europeanist,” Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Neither an instance of a planned strategic change nor a result of an inevitable adaptation to structural shifts at the systemic level, these changes in German foreign policy, incremental yet significant as they are, evade both deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of foreign policy change. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory, the article develops an innovative framework for analysis that is applied to Germany's European asylum and refugee policy as well as its security and defense policy. The origins of both policy fields at the European level can be traced back to initiatives that were supported by or even originated in Germany. However, as the 1990s progressed Germany increasingly obstructed further institutionalization. While in the field of asylum and refugee policy the Amsterdam summit marks a clear turning point in Germany's position, the transformation of German policies on European security and defense proceeded rather as an incremental decrease in material support, aggravating substantive progress in the policy field more broadly. An unanticipated consequence of earlier initiatives, in both cases Germany has found it increasingly difficult to live up to the expectations it has helped to raise.

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De-Europeanization by Default? Germany's EU Policy in Defense and Asylum

Recognition plays a multifaceted role in international theory. In rarely communicating literatures, the term is invoked to explain creation of new states and international structures; policy choices by state and non-state actors; and normative justifiability, or lack thereof, of foreign and international politics. The purpose of this symposium is to open new possibilities for imagining and studying recognition in international politics by drawing together different strands of research in this area. More specifically, the forum brings new attention to controversies on the creation of states, which has traditionally been a preserve for discussion in International Law, by invoking social theories of recognition that have developed as part of International Relations more recently. It is suggested that broadening imagination across legal and social approaches to recognition provides the resources needed for theories with this object to be of maximal relevance to political practice.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1752971913000018

Symposium 'The politics of international recognition'

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Benjamin Herborth

Papers

Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit : Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik

De-Europeanization by Default? Germany's EU Policy in Defense and Asylum

Symposium 'The politics of international recognition'

Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit

Die via media als konstitutionstheoretische Einbahnstraße : Zur Entwicklung des Akteur-Struktur-Problems bei Alexander Wendt