Building on Bourdieu's social theory, this article shows how powerful agents are able to challenge deeply engrained assumptions about the value of nuclear weapons. To illustrate the value of a Bourdieu-inspired analysis in the field of nuclear weapons, we apply his thinking tools of field, symbolic capital and doxa to the recent plea for nuclear disarmament by the US elder statesmen Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn. We analyse how the four revitalized the topic of nuclear disarmament, moving it from the fringes of peace research and grass-roots advocacy to the mainstream of academic research and politics. We argue that the historical context, the high symbolic capital of Shultz and his colleagues, and an appealing narrative that draws on commonplace understandings made their plea resonate with security elites.
Political scientists in many parts of the world have resumed the debate about the discipline's societal relevance in view of manifold political and social challenges. Unlike their international peers, political scientists in Austria have so far not undertaken a thorough reflection of the relevance that their work has beyond academia. Our special issue seeks to fill this gap in the self-reflection of political science in Austria by opening a debate about the conceptual, empirical, normative, and praxeological dimensions of (societal) relevance. This introductory article prepares the ground for the subsequent contributions to the special issue by giving a brief overview of the current debate about the relevance of political science, formulating the research questions that guide the special issue, and introducing a multi-dimensional concept of societal relevance. Building on the work of Van Aalsvoort (2004) and Stuckey et al. (2013), the article distinguishes between civic, professional, and political relevance of political science and discusses the discipline's historical development in Austria against the background of this conceptual framework.
• • Develops a rhetorical field theory that conceptualises the relationship between background ideas and foreground communication • • Distinguishes between two layers of background ideas (nomos and topoi) that underpin communicative encounters in a field • • Conceptualises communicative opportunities and moves through which actors change the nomos of a field • • Illustrates the added value of a rhetorical field theory by inquiring into nomic change in the nuclear-weapons field A burgeoning literature in International Relations draws on Bourdieu's theory of social fields to address the question of how actors make and unmake order in world politics. Inquiring into deeply seated background ideas constituting order, this literature often neglects how communication reproduces and (de)contests background ideas. Our article seeks to remedy this shortcoming by outlining a rhetorical field theory. This theory puts background ideas and foreground communication on an equal footing and conceptualises their relationship in detail. We distinguish between two layers of background ideas (nomos and topoi) and address the crucial question of how nomic change becomes possible. We introduce a typology of nomic change (destabilisation, adaption, disorientation, shift) and conceptualise the interplay of rhetorical opportunities and rhetorical moves that bring about particular types of nomic change. We probe this theoretical framework by analysing the recent nomic change in the nuclear-weapons field. This empirical analysis provides evidence for our theoretical framework.
This article introduces the special issue’s question of whether and how the current transformation of targeted killing is transforming the global international order and provides the conceptual ground for the individual contributions to the special issue. It develops a two-dimensional concept of political order and introduces a theoretical framework that conceives the maintenance and transformation of international order as a dynamic interplay between its behavioral dimension in the form of violence and discursive processes and its institutional dimension in the form of ideas, norms, and rules. The article also conceptualizes targeted killing and introduces a typology of targeted-killing acts on the basis of their legal and moral legitimacy. Building on this conceptual groundwork, the article takes stock of the current transformation of targeted killing and summarizes the individual contributions to this special issue.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.