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International Institutions: Two Approaches
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In this article, it is pointed out that in situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge (Kreps 1984:16).Abstract:
Contemporary world politics is a matter of wealth and poverty, life and death. The members of this Association have chosen to study it because it is so important to lives and those of other people — not because it is either aesthetically attractive or amenable to successful theory-formulation and testing. Indeed, we would be foolish if we studied world politics in search of beauty or lasting truth. Beauty is absent because much that we observe is horrible, and many of the issues that we study involve dilemmas whose contemplation no sane person would find pleasing. Deterministic laws elude us, since we are studying the purposive behavior of relatively small numbers of actors engaged in strategic bargaining. In situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge (Kreps 1984:16). This suggests that no general theory of international politics may be feasible. It makes sense to seek to develop cumulative verifiable knowledge, but we must understand that we can aspire only to formulate conditional, context-specific generalizations rather than to discover universal laws, and that our understanding of world poltitics will always be incomplete.read more
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Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts
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Agents versus structures in English School theory: Is co-constitution the answer?:
TL;DR: While generally accepted as an interpretive theory, Bull's emblematic text demonstrates strong structural characteristics as mentioned in this paper, and subsequent attributions move between the interpretive or "reflexive" and t...
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Woodrow Wilson revisited: Human rights discourse in the foreign policy of the George W. Bush Administration
TL;DR: The George W. Bush administration has been compared with the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson as discussed by the authors, arguing that human rights have been discursively co-opted by both Presidents as a technique of governance in the sense of producing reality by insisting on one specific interpretation of identities and intents.
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The Binding Dynamics of Non-Binding Governance Arrangements. The Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights and the Cases of BP and Chevron
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that current research on public-privatepartnerships suffers from four conceptual difficulties: (1) an underspecified concept of effectiveness, (2) a missing discussion on the yardsticks chosen for assessments, (3) a tendency to (over-)generalize individual findings and (4) underlying yet seldom reflected actor assumptions.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness
TL;DR: In this article, the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society, is examined, and it is argued that reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong.
Book
The Evolution of Cooperation
TL;DR: In this paper, a model based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game was developed for cooperation in organisms, and the results of a computer tournament showed how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
TL;DR: The Economic Institutions of Capitalism as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in the field of economic institutions of capitalism. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 528-530.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Evolution of Cooperation
R. B. Greene,Robert Axelrod +1 more
TL;DR: A model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game to show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.