Tuesday, October 9, 2007
IR issues
Ok, one of my friend's has an IR blog and he posted a question that seemed to go well for his class. So, I'm wondering what do you all think are some of the most important current issues going on in the world and not the academic community. We can discuss these issues in the context of IR stuff, though.
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7 comments:
Post-conflict, post-war, or post-disaster reconstruction is virtually the underlying issue in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo as well as in New Orleans. It's quite easy to complain that certain "goals" were not achieved, but the political science world (as well as the economics or sociology worlds) lags behind. Francis Fukuyama, as always being soundly a half step ahead of the debate, edited a volume on this issue roughly two years ago. Christopher Coyne (http://www.ccoyne.com/) of West Virginia University studies the issue as well. Beyond that, there seems to be a dearth.
Maybe I'll pick one of Coyne's pieces for the IR lunch.
An important current issue regards peacekeeping and peacemaking. The students in the Intro to IR class I T.A. for wrote papers for me on this topic. I found them very interesting because this is a complex topic.
One interesting aspect to it is its relationship to the principle of sovereignty. One concept that we disucussed in the intro class is the "Responsibility to Protect." This concept has two components 1) it says that state leaders have the responsibility to protect their own citizens and 2) if they are unable to do so it becomes the responsibility of the international community. If one accepts the idea of a responsibility to protect the question then becomes when and where? Given the latest trends in Darfur I think this is a pertinent idea to be considered within academia and the policy realm.
Jesse-
"If one accepts the idea of a responsibility to protect the question then becomes when and where? " - Whose "responsibility" are you referring to? A state's or the "international community'"? As a self-proclaimed RC person, I don't know why you'd invoke the latter.
Anyone checking their emails soon should realize that I didn't do what I alluded to in my comment above. I apologize.
Toby-
I really do not see the issue here... The responsibility to protect is a concept that was endorsed by the international community at the 2005 UN Summit. I was simply noting that if someone accepts this, the responsibility to protect, normatively then they must consider when and where to invoke it. In addition, the responsibility to protect refers to the international community and not individual states.
Furthermore, how does what I think policy makers need to consider about a policy challenge whether or not I accept RC as a positive theory used to explain political phenomenom?
I get highly wary when someone uses the word "community" outside of a small, neighborly community, i.e. a village.
"Community" for me has the hue of Rousseau-like "organic" volonté-générale. What that leads to is the search for some interpretation what the "us" truly is. There is supposedly more to the whole than the sum of its parts. I highly doubt that. I see the UN or the so-called "international community" as a mere loose grouping of states. Nothing more, and maybe something less even. I contend that the concept of "community" is at odds with RC.
Your positive approach and your normative approach may surely diverge. The former may assist the latter though, if the normative approach is not supposed to be mere tastes that are essentially unsubstantiated otherwise.
Toby-
"Community" simply implies a group that inhabits a common locality. Therefore, the international community is everyone that inhabits the international system, nothing more. Using it that way it is not at odds with RC.
With regards to my positive approach and my normative approach, I do not think I revealed to much about my normative values for you to draw any valid inferences. I did not even say the resposibility to protect was a "good" concept. All I noted was that if policy makers accept the concept they have to consider when and where to invoke it because there is a lot of variation in potential peacekeeping operations. Yes, that is a normative argument but I think it is reasonable and interesting.
awesome. people are already screaming at each other. i love it.
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