Suchergebnisse

'The Story So Far' is the conclusion of the first centenary Special Issue of the journal International Relations. The issue marks 100 years since the birth of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), whose institutional moment was the endowment establishing the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, at the end of 1918, and its subsequent opening in April 1919. The collection of articles marking this unique event consists of reflections by a group of leading scholars on themes of continuity and change at the international level of world politics in that century. The present article considers these reflections in the context of problematising our attempts to understand the long history and complex dynamics of international relations.

Frankly, most of us find questions about our professional purpose at best too complicated and at worst something of a bore. For most of the time we are too busy cleaning in-trays, smoothing over yesterday's crisis and overlooking tomorrow's, to worry overly much about the essential nature of our jobs. We take them for granted. For most of us, for most of the time, this reluctance to worry about the big questions does not much matter. But for one group it does, and increasingly so. That group is the armed forces of the Western liberal democracies.

The aim of this essay is to show that naval power can be an unfortunate influence on foreign policy as well as a useful instruments that naval power can contribute to the distortion of foreign policy, as well as to its support; that it can be the vehicle for irrational as well as rational behavior; and that it can bite the hand that feeds it, as well as snarling at adversaries. The essay is an attempt to present the other side of the coin to the neoClausewitzian emphasis on clinical instrumentality, in which armed forces are conceived in terms of the clear-cut missions which they perform in the pursuit of political goals.

En este artículo Booth critica la lentitud con la que la disciplina de Relaciones Internacionales se adapta a los cambios contextuales después del fin de la Guerra Fría. Propone un giro en cómo se debería entender uno de los conceptos clave de la disciplina, la seguridad, apartándola de su vinculación con el estado-nación. Para Booth el estado-nación debería ser el medio pero no el fin de la seguridad. El concepto de seguridad debería equivaler a la emancipación entendida como la seguridad económica y física de los individuos y la justicia social. A esta perspectiva le da el nombre de realismo utópico.