Politics

About: Politics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 263762 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5388913 citations.

What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?

Abstract: Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations.Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.

Neorealism and its critics

Abstract: 1. Realism, Neorealism and the Study of World Politics, by Robert O. Keohane2. Laws and Theories, by Kenneth N. Waltz3. Reductionist and Systemic Theories, by Kenneth N. Waltz4. Political Structures, by Kenneth N. Waltz5. Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power, by Kenneth N. Waltz6. Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis, by John Gerard Ruggie7. Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond, by Robert O. Keohane8. Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory, by Robert W. Cox9. The Poverty of Neorealism, by Richard K. Ashley10. The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism, by Robert G. Gilpin11. Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics, by Kenneth N. Waltz

National Responsibility and Global Justice

Abstract: This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibility is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ‘political’ theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worl...

Norms, culture, and world politics: insights from sociology's institutionalism

Abstract: International relations scholars have become increasingly interested in norms of behavior, intersubjective understandings, culture, identity, and other social features of political life. However, our investigations largely have been carried out in disciplinary isolation. We tend to treat our arguments that these things "matter" as discoveries and research into social phenomena as forays into uncharted territory. However, scholars within the fields of international law, history, anthropology, and sociology have always known that social realities influence behavior, and each field has incorporated these social constructions in different ways into research programs. Sociologists working in organization theory have developed a particularly powerful set of arguments about the roles of norms and culture in international life that pose direct challenges to realist and liberal theories in political science. Their arguments locate causal force in an expanding and deepening Western world culture that emphasizes Weberian rationality as the means to both