Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace

Why do agents comply with the norms embedded in regimes and international institutions? Scholars have proposed two competing answers to this compliance puzzle, one rationalist, the other constructivist. Rationalists emphasize coercion, cost/benefit calculations, and material incentives; constructivists stress social learning, socialization, and social norms. Both schools, however, explain important aspects of compliance. To build a bridge between them, I examine the role of argumentative persuasion and social learning. This makes explicit the theory of social choice and interaction implicit in many constructivist compliance studies, and it broadens rationalist arguments about the instrumental and noninstrumental processes through which actors comply. I argue that domestic politics—in particular, institutional and historical contexts—delimit the causal role of persuasion/social learning, thus helping both rationalists and constructivists to refine the scope of their compliance claims. To assess the plausibility of these arguments, I examine why states comply with new citizenship/membership norms promoted by European regional organizations.

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Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change

Nowadays, most nurses, pre- and post-qualification, will be required to undertake a literature review at some point, either as part of a course of study, as a key step in the research process, or as part of clinical practice development or policy. For student nurses and novice researchers it is often seen as a difficult undertaking. It demands a complex range of skills, such as learning how to define topics for exploration, acquiring skills of literature searching and retrieval, developing the ability to analyse and synthesize data as well as becoming adept at writing and reporting, often within a limited time scale. The purpose of this article is to present a step-by-step guide to facilitate understanding by presenting the critical elements of the literature review process. While reference is made to different types of literature reviews, the focus is on the traditional or narrative review that is undertaken, usually either as an academic assignment or part of the research process.

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Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach

Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Prologue: The Bus 1. Introduction 2. The California Political Economy 3. The Prison Fix 4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism 5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children 6. What Is to Be Done? Epilogue: Another Bus Notes

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

International Security Studies (ISS) has changed and diversified in many ways since 1945. This book provides the first intellectual history of the development of the subject in that period. It explains how ISS evolved from an initial concern with the strategic consequences of superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, to its current diversity in which environmental, economic, human and other securities sit alongside military security, and in which approaches ranging from traditional Realist analysis to Feminism and Post-colonialism are in play. It sets out the driving forces that shaped debates in ISS, shows what makes ISS a single conversation across its diversity, and gives an authoritative account of debates on all the main topics within ISS. This is an unparalleled survey of the literature and institutions of ISS that will be an invaluable guide for all students and scholars of ISS, whether traditionalist, ‘new agenda’ or critical. • The first book to tell the post-1945 story of International Security Studies and offer an integrated historical sociology of the whole field • Opens the door to a long-overdue conversation about what ISS is and where it should be going • Provides a detailed institutional account of ISS in terms of its journals, departments, think tanks and funding sources

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The Evolution of International Security Studies

Students entering a graduate program often encounter a new type of assignment that differs from the papers they had to write in high school or as college undergraduates: the literature review (also known as a critical review essay). Put briefly, a literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writings about a specific topic. The need to conduct such reviews is by no means limited to graduate students; scholarly researchers generally carry out literature reviews throughout their research careers. In a world where the Internet has broadened the range of potentially relevant sources, however, doing a literature review can pose challenges even to an experienced researcher.In drafting this overview, I have incorporated some points made by Paul Pitman in a lecture delivered to students at the Naval Postgraduate School. I have also incorporated some suggestions contained in a handout prepared by John Odell for students in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California.

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Doing a Literature Review

Following the end of the Cold War and accelerating after 9/11, a new wave of research on deterrence has emerged. Building on an earlier characterization by Robert Jervis, this work is here designated the fourth wave. The fourth wave reflects efforts to grapple with the change from a relatively symmetrical situation of mutual deterrence that characterized the Cold War to the asymmetric threats that dominate the current security environment for the United States and many other states. Despite widespread doubts that have been expressed in public about whether the most threatening actors today are deterrable, the fourth wave is nearly unanimous in finding that deterrence remains relevant, even with respect to terrorism. Beyond this basic consensus, the fourth wave also includes vigorous debates, particularly regarding alternative strategies for dealing with WMD-seeking rogue states. Because few analysts expect deterrence to be foolproof, especially in dealing with non-state actors, much of the work has focuse...

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The Fourth Wave in Deterrence Research

Specialists on U.S. public opinion and foreign policy have rejected the Almond-Lippmann consensus, which implied public attitudes were dangerously erratic, and have moved in varying degrees toward ...

How Rational Is “The Rational Public”?: Evidence from U.S. Public Opinion on Military Spending

A programme of research on learning in international relations began developing in the 1980s. However, learning research has not realised its potential. This article seeks to stimulate new work on learning by analysing why learning is important in international relations and outlining a research focus that reflects this assessment of learning's significance. The research so far has mostly treated learning as a foreign policy phenomenon, but this fails to capture one of the major reasons for interest in learning. Learning matters in part because of long-standing debates about whether it is possible to make progress in reducing the amount of armed conflict in world politics. For such progress to occur, it is likely that some form of learning would have to take place. However, learning by just a single state will often not be sufficient to change the quality of international outcomes. There thus needs to be research specifically on the possibility of shared learning by two or more states, a research focus this article will label ‘international learning’. A few illustrative examples will demonstrate the feasibility of doing research on shared, cross-national learning.

The importance of international learning

While policy makers and scholars have long devoted considerable attention to strategies like deterrence, which threaten others with unacceptable consequences, such threat-based strategies are not always the best option. In some cases, a state may be better off seeking to give others a greater sense of security, rather than by holding their security at risk. The most prominent use of these security assurances has been in conjunction with efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Ongoing concerns about the nuclear activities of countries like Iran and North Korea, and the possible reactions of other states in their regions, have catapulted this topic into high profile. This book represents the first study to explore the overall utility of assurance strategies, to evaluate their effectiveness as a tool for preventing nuclear proliferation, and to identify conditions under which they are more or less likely to be effective.

Jeffrey W. Knopf

Papers

Doing a Literature Review

The Fourth Wave in Deterrence Research

How Rational Is “The Rational Public”?: Evidence from U.S. Public Opinion on Military Spending

The importance of international learning

Security assurances and nuclear nonproliferation