Theories of International Relations: from an American Science Towards a Pluralism of Thought

The change was not only promised during Obama’s electoral campaign but urgently invoked by all the major international actors in view of the financial and economic crises: the world foreign policy has suddenly entered a new age not being yet prepared to govern globalization and its wide interdependence conditionality. Even Russia has changed tune now and President Medvedev announced vigorously a new strategy, a new policy, and a new drive for Russia. Until a few years ago, the theories of International Relations were simply an American intellectual and governance exit of the growing role of the US in the world, a kind of field of competence for the greatest power in the global economic, political, strategic and innovative sectors. The British School was an island of the core American thinking and the rest of the world mostly absent. FSU has not expressed a relevant contribution to the various schools of thinking related to the IR theories and even the Marxist political scientists did not dedicate specifically to this main research area because convinced that first it was not a real “science” but a derivative outcome from Philosophy or Political Science; secondly, for the reason of the monopoly of the power in the hands of an autocratic regime where these issues were not left to the researchers and experts but only to the institutional and military leadership. Today Russia—after having caressed and found opportunistically convenient to resume the realism doctrines of the past US almost decennial Presidency, with modest attempts to assume the great changes in international affairs intervened— has the chance to take the last train for a competitive power role, “de facto” under the unavoidable strict rules of engagement of the global governance. In the 2020–2030 the world would be completely reshape by the present metamorphosis.     

The Post-Soviet Space: A Transition Period

This article analyzes the processes taking place in the “post-Soviet space”—the former Soviet Union. This notion is viewed as a special historical phenomenon implying not only common territory but also political, economic, cultural, mental, civil, and other mutual ties inherited from the past. The social and political nature of the “post-Soviet space” is fast-changing due to the impact of three interrelated factors: economic (the difference in economic potentials and the resource base, the increasing dependence on fluctuations in prices for basic export commodities in the global market, and the weak domestic markets); political (a new kind of conflicts between former Soviet republics, the instability of the political-party systems, the immaturity of civil society, and the growth of authoritarian trends); and international one (the region is a crossroads of the geopolitical interests of the world’s major players—Russia, the United States, the European Union and China). The vital importance of this space for Russia causes it to pursue an active policy in this region.     

Black Gold and Blue Gold: The Importance of Energy in the New Power Policy of the Russian Federation

After having been forced to face a decade of economic and political difficulties, the Russian Federation is regaining a position of prestige on the international stage thanks to an astute utilization of its huge reserves of oil and natural gas. With the coming to power of Vladimir Putin—and in particular from 2004—the State has changed its policy in the energy field, aiming to come back to exert a strict control over the main companies and assets. One of the most significant consequences of this change has been the outbreak of disputes with Ukraine and Belarus about the selling price of gas, which caused fears among the entire Europe about the reliability of Russia as a supplier of that resource. Moreover, the quarrels forced many Western analysts to condemn the way Moscow is acting to try and become an “energy superpower”.

Economic,Financial and Geopolitical Governance: USA,European Union and China

The paper examines the policies, choices, structural reforms, regulatory rules, corporate and public administration matching the world standards, openness, innovation, competitiveness, fulfillment of multilateral obligations, integration and regional approach achievements and international relations conditionality in the “Global Governance and Geopolitics” of the main economic, financial and policy issues, with special focus on the new regional approaches pursued by America, the European Union and Asia and the role of the emerging and transition countries. After the US Dollar, now the Eurozone is under pressure and the main Asian countries fear a contagion effect. While somebody proposes a slow devaluation of the Euro in order to soften the public deficits of the group of most exposed countries and restore more competitiveness to the real economy, political leaders are thinking to adopt indirectly the Euro two speeds operative monetary strategy, through the introduction of the majority vote, instead of the full Members consensus, for the most important decisions at the ECB in Frankfurt. Aside these monetary and institutional measures, the binding of the single national fiscal policy to more strict EU parameters of compatibility with the Eurozone sustainability appear unavoidable. This paper represents the background of my lecture given on November 4 at the Beijing Forum 2011 “The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All: Tradition and Modernity, Transition and Transformation” () at the PEK University.     

The making of the global gambling industry: An application and extension of field theory

The past two decades have seen a global convergence from gambling prohibition to legalization, but also a divergence regarding how new gambling industries are structured and regulated. This article compares two cases of casino legalization exhibiting different and, given conventional understandings of the two countries, unexpected outcomes. In the United States, ethnic entrepreneurs (Indian tribes) were granted a monopoly on casinos in California; in South Africa, the new ANC government legalized a competitive, corporate casino industry. Through explaining these disparate industry structurings, two arguments are advanced. First, Bourdieu's field theory best describes the interests and strategies of industry “players” as they attempted to shape policy. Second, Bourdieu neglects the independent role of institutions in mediating between field-level dynamics and concrete regulatory outcomes. In California, Tribes converted economic into political capital through a public election. In South Africa, the ANC used a centralized commission to implement corporate gambling over public opposition, in essence converting political into economic capital. By viewing policy domains as “dramaturgical prisms” whose sign–production tools and audiences facilitate certain but not other capital conversion projects, I both explain unexpected regulatory outcomes and synthesize field and political process theories. Jeffrey J. Sallaz received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. In addition to examining the struggles surrounding gambling legalization, he has studied ethnographically the experience of service work in the global casino industry and the politics of deindustrialization in the US rust belt. He is currently conducting research for a project analyzing the uneven diffusion of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas into the field of American sociology over the past three decades.     

Neither clear nor present: The social construction of safety and danger

Perceptions of safety and danger are “intersubjective”—products of social construction, collective agreement, and socialization. While objective danger certainly exists, perceptions of danger do not derive directly from observation of the empirical world. The objective environment provides only inconsistent and ambiguous information, permitting ample room for socially constructed beliefs. Three cognitive frameworks—the Cautious, Confident, and Neutral frameworks—organize perceptions of safety and danger. Each framework begins with a default assumption about safety and danger and “marks” certain items as different from this default. In shaping expectations, these frameworks also contribute to perceptions of horror, humor, excitement, and fear. Finally, I use these frameworks to analyze the psychological concept “phobia” as a sociological phenomenon.     

The generalized action potential of protest movements: The new class,social trends,and political exclusion explanations

Three explanations have been advanced to account for the generalized action potential of contemporary protest movements: the rise of the new class, a set of general social trends that cumulatively lead to liberalized social values and loosened social restraints against protest, and the mobilization of excluded groups. Analyzing three dimensions of generalized action potential—protest potential, political action repertoires, and protest movement support—we find support for all three explanations. Educated salaried professionals, especially sociocultural and public sector professionals, display greater protest potential, especially for civil disobedience, and are supportive of emerging “middle class” movements. A set of general social trends centering on increased education, life-cycle and generational change, secularism, and increased women's autonomy also create greater action potential. Reflecting mobilization against political exclusion, African Americans display a consistently strong generalized action potential. These protests reflect the rise of new political repertoires, particularly “protest activism,” which combines protest with high levels of conventional participation and is centered among the more educated.     

The Rise of International Nongovernmental Organizations: A Top-Down or Bottom-Up Explanation?

This study examines the conditions that facilitate the growth of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) in 126 countries, from 1982 to 2000. To explain the uneven growth of INGOs around the world, I test two competing theoretical approaches. The “top-down” perspective of growth focuses on the degree of a country’s integration into the world polity and international economy. The “bottom-up” perspective emphasizes the development of democracy and the prosperity of the domestic economy as significant factors in facilitating INGO growth within a given country. An econometric analysis of panel data with ordinary least squares (OLS) suggests that both economic and political factors at the global and national level explain the rise of INGOs, rather than viewing either in an isolated fashion.     

Jurisdiction,inscription, and state formation: administrative modernism and knowledge regimes

In seventeenth-century France, Colbert built a more effective state administration not by rationalizing state offices but by using public documents to increase the government’s intellectual capacity to exercise logistical power and engage in territorial governance. This pattern calls into question Weber’s model of the genesis of “modern officialdom,” suggesting that its source was not social rationalization, but rather the identification and management of expertise. Colbert recruited into government nascent technocrats with knowledge useful to territorial politics, using contracts and other documents to limit their independence and subordinate them to patrimonial authorities. They exercised specific duties and impersonal powers in jurisdictional areas—much like modern technocrats. Their expertise enhanced the intellectual capacity of the administration to exercise territorial power and made the state less dependent on patrimonial clienteles without challenging the patrimonial culture of power/knowledge.     

Corruption,Social Welfare,Culture and Religion in European Union 27

Corruption is a complex and generalized phenomenon all over the world, with economical, cultural, social, psychological, political, administrative and religious dimensions. Defining and studying the phenomenon go through the most different thinking filters known in the specialist literature: economic, social-cultural, political, administrative and religious. The aim of this article is to quantify and analyze, in European Union 27 (EU27), the relationship between corruption and economic, cultural and religious determinant factors, through a regressive “pool data” model, for the period 1996–2008. The conclusion is that, in the EU27 case, social welfare, power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and religious influence significantly influence corruption. Moreover, religion attenuates uncertainty avoidance, more exactly situations such as uncertainty, the unknown, ambiguity or unexpected circumstances.     

Rereading the Gettysburg address: Social change and collective memory

Recent scholarship depicts the Gettysburg Address as an unchanging symbol of American democracy. This investigation shows new meanings of the Gettysburg Address arising as successive generations interpret it in light of new situations and challenges. Lincoln's supporters interpreted the Gettysburg Address as a call to arms, a plea to grasp the victory that the Union's dead had brought into sight. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Gettysburg Address was recognized for its aesthetic appeal, but rarely commemorated. As early twentieth-century Progressive reforms redistributed political power, as Northerners and Southerners renounced old hatreds, and as foreign wars enhanced America's global role, the Gettysburg Address became a multivalent symbol of industrial democracy, regional solidarity, and patriotism. Abraham Lincoln's Address assumed its present meaning, which incorporates the often conflicting ideals of racial equality and regional unity, in the late twentieth-century. As the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s expanded, Lincoln's prestige fell dramatically. Lincoln, paradoxically, was reduced by the power of the egalitarian ideal he symbolized—even as that ideal became embodied in his own words. To resolve this paradox, postmodernist conceptions of author-reader relations are brought to bear on current understandings of collective memory.     

Twilight for organized labor

Conclusion The Old Unionism, organized labor in the private economy, is in irreversible decline. Economic and market factors beyond its control are principally responsible. The absence of effective leadership and its emphasis on political, instead of trade union, goals do not help. The substitution has diverted much of organized labor’s large financial resources to advancing a political agenda which has brought no material gains in membership and market share, but stigmatizes the union movement as a “special interest” group and as the Luddites of the new century: “American labor organizations ... are shaped much more basically by events of the past century than by forces of the past fifteen years” (Dunlop, 1978, p. 79). I am indebted to Ka-Neng Au, librarian at the Dana Library of Rutgers University, Newark, for his accurate and timely assistance with research information and citations of various references.     

The organizational shaping of collective identity: The case of lesbian and gay film festivals in New York

Using information gathered during fieldwork on New York lesbian and gay film festival organizations, this paper argues that scholarship on identity has not paid sufficient attention to the organizational mediation of collective identity. The shape of collective identity—how internal instabilities and diversities are accommodated, in this case—depends not only on the emergent characteristics of the “collective,” but also on the resolution of challenges particular to organizational fields. Two very differently conceived lesbian and gay festival organizations, sites at which decision making about collective identity is ongoing and self-conscious, are examined. The analysis traces how each responds to two related tasks: maintaining community legitimacy, which requires racial diversification, and surviving within an altered institutional environment. Rather than imposition from “above” or construction from “below,” the adaptive responses by organizations (to changes in both community expectations and the resource environment) transform the collective identity formulations reaching public visibility. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Colloquium Series of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, 1995, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, DC, 1995.     

Philosophy on the Ground: An Appreciation of a “Spirit Master”

This essay is an appreciation of Melvin Pollner’s distinctive sociological approach to topics that are usually associated with philosophy. Pollner’s dissertation and early writings took up the theme of “mundane reason,” which he defined as an incorrigible presumption of a real world that is implicit in everyday conduct. Pollner addressed mundane reason, and the reciprocal idea of “reality disjunctures”—momentary divergences between perceptual accounts of the “same” mundane reality—by describing routine exchanges in traffic court and confrontations between doctors and patients in psychiatric settings. Pollner’s work anticipated current enthusiasms for developing novel “ontologies” in social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and other subjects. Although he did attempt to locate metaphysics in the midst of everyday experience, this essay suggests that his “philosophy on the ground” radically transformed philosophical ontology into an original and imaginative way to investigate constitutive activities.     

History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology

Based on archival and ethnographic data from the Polish case, this article argues that national mythology is structured by historical events and embodied in visual and material cultures, which in turn frame national subjects’ understanding of the present. It suggests that the convergence and exchange between diverse sites of material expression and sensory perception, and their compression into trans-temporal nodes—what I call the “national sensorium”—makes them especially resilient. Even so, as historically constructed, contingent and contested systems of myths, the extent to which national mythologies can shape national identity or mobilize toward nationalist action depends on the specific historical contexts in which they are deployed. Theoretically, this article joins historical and phenomenological approaches to propose a framework for thinking about the constitution, persistence and shifting social and political valences of national mythologies.     

Global-market building as state building: China’s entry into the WTO and market reforms of China’s tobacco industry

This article analyzes how China’s increasing engagement in the global market induced significant institution-building in China’s tobacco industry and enabled a power shift from the local authorities to the central authority in controlling this market. During this process of “getting onto the international track,” the central government reorganized the industrial tobacco system and broke up the “monopolies” set up by local governments in order to enhance the competitive capacities of China’s tobacco industry in the global market. Given such a concrete institutional change in China’s tobacco industry, I propose the theory of “global-market building as state building” to explain the interactions among the global market, the nation-states, and the domestic market-building projects. I suggest that nation-states strategically seek to engage themselves in the global market and that, under certain circumstances by taking advantage of their global market engagement, the nation-states can enhance their abilities to govern the domestic market.

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Quebec Sociology: A Discipline and its Object

Quebec sociology and Quebec society are categorically distinct from other sociologies and countries. Both are “communities,” both have French-speaking majorities, and both exist in Anglo-Saxon environments. As well, Quebec sociology has always been and continues to be obsessed by the national question. Interpretations proposed by sociologists—predominantly French-speaking—of and about the Quebec Question have never been independent of the struggles in which they have taken place. In fact, sociological readings of nationalism in Quebec appear to be a direct consequence of their social position and relationship with political power. Through the prism of sociology, the French-speaking collectivity in Canada has been, successively and simultaneously, characterized through categories of race, ethnic group, society, and nation. 2 This article presents five ways in which sociologists have represented Quebec society. First, the Pioneers: Léon Gérin and Marius Barbeau, or the Quebec “Difference” as a handicap. Second, the characterization of Quebec through race, territory, and soul. Third provides the external perspectives of Miner and Hughes. Fourth will examine the Laval (Quebec) School. Finally, this article will examine Quebec Society as either an ethnic or civic nation. Each theme has been set chronologically in specific periods of Quebec sociology: the Pioneers (Part 1 and 2, before 1940); the institutionalization of academic sociology (Part 3 and 4, 1940-1969); and the “nationalization” and professionalization of sociology (Part 5, 1970 to the present).     

Sociologists and american prohibition: A study of early works in the american journal of sociology1895–1935

Sociology, since its inception, has regarded itself as an agency for investigating social change. Alcohol reform during American Prohibition has been studied from status-politics and politico-economic perspectives. This work delineates what sociologists of the early twentieth-century observed and wrote about the American experiment with Prohibition in the early American Journal of Sociology. Overall, these sociologist gave limited attention to Prohibition. Why AJS sociologists had so little to contribute can be understood by situating the answer in the early sociohistorical context of the social pathology perspective and the Chicago School of sociology. We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. —Weber¹ His interests are social deviance and social theory and include the role of the media in the American prohibition. The quote is from Max Weber’s essay “Science as Vocation” fromMax Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1946, 148.) London: Oxford.     

A feminist revisiting of the insider/outsider debate: The “outsider phenomenon” in rural Iowa

This article draws upon findings from an ethnographic study of two towns in rural Iowa to examine the adequacy of the insider/outsider distinction as a guideline for evaluating and conducting ethnographic research. Utilizing feminist standpoint and materialist feminist theories, I start with the assumption that, rather than one “insider” or “outsider” position, we all begin our work with different relationships to shifting aspects of social life and to particular knowers in the community and this contributes to numerous dimensions through which we can relate to residents in various communities. “Outsiderness” and “insiderness” are not fixed or static positions, rather they are ever-shifting and permeable social locations illustrated in this case study by the “outsider phenomenon.” Community processes that reorganize and resituate race-ethnicity, gender and class relations form some of the most salient aspects of the “outsider phenomenon.” These dynamic processes shaped our relationships with residents as ethnographic identities were repositioned by shifts in constructions of “community” that accompanied ongoing social, demographic, and political changes.     

Interaction Ritual Chains and the Mobilization of Conscientious Consumers

Markets for “socially responsible” products are comprised of activists who lead protests, organize boycotts, and promote the consumption of these goods. However, the ultimate success of these movements is dependent upon the support of a large number of consumers whose self-professed values often contradict with their own purchasing patterns. Consumer support of socially responsible products cannot be explained by consumer culture theories, which privilege identity, attitudes, and behavior, or mass consumption theories, which emphasize location and advertising’s influence on consumption patterns. These perspectives are informative but unable to explain why some consumers will only buy socially responsible products while others with similar value systems possess much more contradictory consumption patterns. I extend Collin’s theory of “Interaction Ritual chains” to show that rituals and emotions—more than identity or coercive advertising—explain how ethical consumers are mobilized. I show how face-to-face interactions between consumers and producers produce solidarity and motivate support for the Fair Trade movement. This paper employs a micro-sociological approach to contribute to studies of ethical consumption in three notable ways: 1) it emphasizes the importance of “contexts” and is able to explain contradictions in consumer behavior; 2), it contributes to our understanding of “brand communities” by describing the micro-sociological processes that both help to build these communities and create value within the products that organize these groups; and 3) it offers the potential to develop a predictive model for the purchasing patterns of consumers.