This article intends to contribute to the theorising of institutional change. Specifically, it asks how dynamics in the ‘deep structure’ of international society correspond to changes in more specific institutions as embodied by regimes and international organisations. It does so by taking up the distinction of primary and secondary institutions in international society advocated by scholars of the English School. It argues that, while the differentiation offers analytical potential, the School has largely failed to study secondary institutions such as international organisations and regimes as autonomous objects of analysis, seeing them as mere materialisations of primary institutions. Engaging with the concepts of structuration and path dependence will allow scholars working in an English School framework to explore more deeply the relation between the two kinds of institutions, and as a consequence devise more elaborate theories of institutional change. Based on this argument, the article develops a theoretical model that sees primary and secondary institutions entangled in distinctive processes of constitution and institutionalisation. This model helps to establish international organisations and regimes as a crucial part of the English School agenda, and to enlighten the political mechanisms that lead to continuity and change in international institutions more broadly.
The 'hybrid' United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) was initially hailed as a model for peacekeeping cooperation between the UN and African regional organizations. However, UNAMID soon faced contestation from different stakeholders, and the UN and the AU have now essentially abandoned the hybrid approach. The article reconstructs how the mission's deteriorating legitimacy relates to changing selflegitimation strategies by the two organizations. The UN and the AU pursued mutual legitimation when establishing UNAMID, but later mobilized historical narratives and diverging normative standards to promote competing authority claims. The article thus advances an understanding of inter-organizational relations as inherently political.
A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.
This article compares the European Union's (EU) actorness in foreign financial policy to that of the US and ASEAN. It thus contributes to the dialogue between EU studies and the New Regionalism by putting it into practice through comparative research. It argues that a process-oriented interpretation of the actorness concept can be used to compare the EU to both nation-states and international organizations at the same time. This makes it possible to examine the 'nature of the beast' in specific foreign policy contexts on empirical grounds. The case study analyses EU, US and ASEAN actorness in the IMF reform negotiations within the G20 framework. The findings suggest that a 'two-way comparison' of the EU is not only possible but also provides valuable empirical insights into the role of informal politics in the EU and other regions.
ASEAN member states have invested substantially in cooperation on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR). Despite broad support for the idea of 'localizing' HADR governance, the rise of regional agency has in practice led to uncertainty and frictions between humanitarian stakeholders. The article makes sense of these tensions by investigating the narratives through which intra-and extraregional agents construct the role of the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Centre). Based on the assumption that narratives are central legitimating practices when new agents enter a governance arena, it analyzes textual material produced by different humanitarian organizations that operate in Southeast Asia, as well as interviews with representatives from these organizations. Their accounts of the AHA Centre's role can be grouped into four narratives that are bound up with competing ideas about regional humanitarian order: an affirmative one, a skeptical one, a critical one and a transformative one. The article thus rejects characterizations of regional HADR as a rationally designed 'architecture' and instead defines it as a deeply political arena where different conceptions of order are asserted, contested and negotiated.
It is becoming customary to define the English School (ES) as a group of scholars participating in a common inquiry related to a few central concepts, notably that of international society (Dunne 1998;Buzan 2001 Buzan , 2004. Although the roots of the ES are often attributed to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (Dunne 1998;Vigezzi 2005;Navari 2009), it is now said to be more of an open society of impersonal ties rather than an exclusive community based on personal relations (Buzan 2004: 110-111). But how true is that assertion? If the School is theoretically open to anyone, why are its members predominantly male, white and Western? 1 In this piece, we discuss three obstacles that prevent the ES from becoming a more inclusive venture.
with the best theoretically-informed scholarship on the global issues of our time. The series includes cutting-edge monographs and edited collections which bridge schools of thought and cross the boundaries of conventional fields of study. EISA members can access a 50% discount to PSIR here http://www.eisa-net.org/sitecore/content/be-bruga/mci-registrations/ eisa/login/landing.aspx. Mai'a K. Davis Cross is the
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