The procedures for electronic submission that were adopted in 2003 will continue to be used in 2004; note that page limits have been placed on the vita/biographical sketches.
Follow this link for a description of the procedures for 2004.
Follow this link for a description of why we made these changes.
Proposals are arranged in alphabetical order by principal proposer's last name.
Henry F. Carey
Georgia State University
Amount Requested $4,000
Amount Awarded: $4,000.
International organisations, donors and governments increasingly regard NGOs as the primary agencies for the implementation of their policies in (post) civil war environments. The ethical and practical dilemmas facing NGOs become more tortured as complex emergencies demand equally complex international and local responses. This is a topic that merits serious scrutiny and is a popular topic of discussion among academics and students. I was the co-recipient of a 19999 ISA workshop grant, which produced a book and a journal special issue (see my personal record below). This project would focus on the constraints and opportunities available for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in reconciling former enemies and in peacebuilding. NGOs have been deeply involved in helping countries recover from the trauma of armed conflict. NGOs include human rights monitors, social and humanitarian organizations, well as foundations and research institutes. They have become essential to building stable communities and effective institutions, especially in the past fifteen years. Of course, many NGOs end up feeling their involvement in peacekeeping and peacebuilding is not sufficiently meaningful or effective, while some governments dislike the increasing pressure to make more room for civil society through NGO participation in peace deliberations, monitoring and services. Though hardly a panacea, NGOs have made an enormous difference to complex peace processes by both their independent interventions and via their cooperation with state and multilateral interventions at the socio-political and developmental levels.
Gregory Gleason
University of New Mexico
Houman Sadri
University of Central Florida
Carol Saivetz
American Association for the
Advancement of Slavic Studies, Davis Center, Harvard University
Amount Requested $5,000
Amount Awarded: $5,000.
Conventional Westphalian concepts of the international system posit states as the primary actors in the dynamics of international high politics. Collective security arrangements, while they vary in form and scope, typically obligate states to act in certain ways with respect to other states. The post-Cold War landscape of challenges emanating from hard-to-identify and hard-to-locate terrorist, separatist, criminal and extremist organizations is challenging traditional conceptions of collective security. This workshop brings together younger and senior scholars from Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan and the U.S. to analyze problems of Russian relations with Central Asian, South Asia, and Middle Eastern states. The project theoretically focuses on cooperation theory, collective security arrangements and the role of non-state actors in the region. The workshop is planned to take place prior to the 2006 ISA annual meeting scheduled for San Diego. The project is designed to lead to a collective volume on RussiaÕs southern relations.
Virginia Haufler
University of Maryland, College Park
Amount Requested $5,042
Amount Awarded: $5,000.
The "first wave" of scholarship in international relations depicted finance as a structure against which states and sub-state interests struggled in order to attain their ends. A new wave of scholarship, however, looks at finance and financial institutions as instruments or agents for third parties to achieve a variety of social, political, and environmental goals. Policymakers and activists alike view public and private financial institutions as having leverage over other firms and states, and seek to use this leverage to achieve non-market goals such as the protection of human rights, the ending of conflict, and the adoption of socially responsible corporate policies. This shifts attention to issues such as the delegation of foreign policy to private actors; the
This workshop brings together senior and junior scholars to analyze how and why policymakers and activists are now delegating the achievement of important values to the financial sector. This raises interesting questions about delegation of authority, the potential ŅslippageÓ between principals and agents, and the degree to which this trend enhances or degrades the authority of the state or even of the financial sector itself. Participants will draw upon a variety of perspectives to explore and explain the emergence and implications of this trend, such as principal-agent theory, corporate goverance, regulatory and self-regulatory approaches. We will explore the factors that propel this trend, examine the degree to which the use of financial leverage actually succeeds in promoting normative change, the impact any such changes may have on the relationship between the private sector and local states and communities, and the wider implications this has for global governance and private authority.
The International Communications Section of the International Studies
Association
(ICOMM)
Amount Requested $5,550
Amount Awarded: $5,500.
The International Communications section workshop is proposed as the first of a series which will also form the basis for a biennial Research in International Communications handbook. Its focus is to bring international relations and international communication scholars from around the world to share and assess ongoing international communication research projects that inform the field of international relations writ large. The 2005 focus is two-fold: (1) International Communications research and constructivism and (2) International Communications research and foreign policy analysis. In each case, particular attention will be paid to methodological issues, advances, and contributions; dialogue among scholars and across ISA sections will be encouraged.
Nathan Jensen
Washington University, St. Louis
Quan Li
Pennsylvania State University
Amount Requested $6,000
Amount Awarded: $5,500.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational corporations (MNCs) have long taken a prominent position in the field of international business, comparative and international political economy. In many ways, academic research of the political economy of FDI and MNCs has fallen behind their real world development. In the real world, while FDI still concentrates in the advanced industrialized countries, many emerging market economies have become favorite investment destinations and even origins of capital flows. Developing countries have actively engaged in policies pursuing foreign capital, abandoning their capital controls and their previous strategies of shunning foreign businesses as a source of exploitation and underdevelopment. Increasingly mergers and acquisitions have become as important a mode of foreign capital entry as greenfield investment. FDI has interacted in many countries with public policies regarding redistribution, taxation, antitrust regulation, labor and human rights, capital controls, and environmental regulation. The growing and spreading presence of FDI and MNCs have rekindled the strong anti-capitalist interest of many social activists, generating a variety of forms of social movements responding to foreign capital. In contrast, the academic research of FDI and MNCs has failed to address many of these developments. In the field of international business, the role of politics is typically reduced to a single variable measuring political instability and risk. The bargaining models have fully recognized the role of host governments but rigorous empirical analysis of the hypothesized effects of governments is still rare. In comparative and international political economy, most research of FDI and MNCs is either anecdotal and case-study-based or argumentative and conjectural. Both generalizable theory development and rigorous robust statistical evidence are lacking in terms of how politics interacts with FDI and MNCs. In essence, while various new developments in FDI and MNCs emerge and involve interactions with domestic and international politics, the theoretical as well as empirical research in the political economy of FDI and MNCs has failed to address the full import of these new developments. Our understanding of the politics of FDI and MNCs is seriously underdeveloped.
We propose organizing a workshop on the political economy of FDI and MNCs to address the gap in our theoretical and empirical research of multinational corporations. The theme of the workshop will focus on the relationship between domestic political institutions and various issues MNCs face. The workshop builds on the initial work of the workshop organizers and investigates a range of related issues. Li and Resnick (2003 IO) specify different mechanisms by which democratic institutions promote or reduce FDI inflows to developing host countries. On the one hand, democratic institutions ensure better property rights protection for foreign investors, increasing risk adjusted investment returns. One the other hand, democratic institutions involve more strict anti-trust regulation against MNCs, lower levels of tax incentives, and more subsidies for host firms threatened by foreign competition, all of which may discourage foreign investment inflows. Empirical evidence appears to support these arguments.
Helen M. Kinsella
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Marysia Zalewski
Queen's University, Belfast, N. Ireland
Amount Requested $5,000
Amount Awarded: $5,000.
How do we bring conflicting knowledge about "gender," its structural, practical and discursive manifestations in daily life, to bear on the quest to prevent or resolve conflict and build sustainable peace? What does identifying the articulation of sex and sex differences during conflict tell us about possible routes to its resolution? How can tracing alterations in the multiple activities of men and women -- as combatants, civilians, war makers, peace-builders, labourers, citizens, and caretakers -- inform our programs for peace? Conversely, what will the answers to these questions tell us about our understandings of gender, sex, and sex difference? How does tracing alterations in the multiple activities of men and women during and after conflict alter our understandings of gender, sex, and sex difference? How can the resolution of conflict and the building of sustainable peace reify or transform understandings of gender and sex? Although international relations scholars have begun to address these questions , feminist scholars outside the discipline of IR suggest that they have yet to fully engage with the "crucial conceptual co-ordinates" of gender and sex that inform their research. For, strikingly, the discipline of international relations -- even those scholars who employ gender as an analytic category -- has yet to discover and fully engage with the detailed and diverse debates over gender and sex. Rather, the essential presumption remains that gender is a synonym for women. Unfortunately, this use of gender limits our understanding of gender to the conditions and characteristics of womenÕs lives -- as if these conditions and characteristics developed independently and in isolation from other social relations and as if only women were affected by conceptions and expectations of gender. Surely, in a world as fraught and troubled as ours, we need a more sophisticated approach to gender and sex and the concomitant relationship with peace and conflict, while we certainly will gain from better specification of what, exactly, is meant by those concepts. Consequently, the aim of this workshop is two-fold. Our first aim is to introduce to the discipline of international relations the more substantive, detailed, and diverse debates over the concept and meanings of gender, sex, and sex difference that deeply altered research and practice in other cognate disciplines (e.g., economics, anthropology, history, sociology, cultural studies), in the fields of conflict resolution, and peace-keeping, and within multilateral organizations (e.g., the United Nations). To cite just one pivotal example from the discipline of economics and the work of non-governmental organizations, these debates led to the re-conceptualization of paths of income distribution within both stable and refugee populations -- in the latter case resulting in both men and women becoming direct recipients of food aid -- after it was demonstrated, contrary to common assumption, that male heads of households did not fairly distribute familial and social income. Scholars and practitioners had to grapple with conceptions of masculinity, power, and need in the context of rebuilding family and social relationships among refugee populations to adequately address the question of income distribution -- simply focusing on women and giving them aid without adequate attention to social and familial relationships proved to be insufficient.
Sweeping changes in the Baltic region since the end of the Cold War have led to a significant geo-political realignment in Europe's "northern dimension." For the previous half century, the Baltic had been part of a larger pattern of great power confrontation, ameliorated to some degree by the treaty-imposed neutrality of Finland and self-chosen neutrality of Sweden. Today the region is a distinctive realm of development, shaped by national aspirations of the three Baltic Republics, the expansion of the influence of the eastern Scandinavian states (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) through a reorientation of their aid and trade policies, the expansion of both NATO and the European Union, and the substantial political interest of the Russian Federation in its "near abroad" of the former Soviet Baltic republics with their significant ethnic Russian populations. Once again, as in previous eras, the Baltic Sea unites the countries that border it.
We are currently assembling a trans-Atlantic team of scholars to assess multiple dimensions of security among the nations bordering on the Baltic, with an emphasis on national and regional economic, social, political, and military security policies. The countries include Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the three Baltic republics, Poland, and Germany.
Proposals are arranged in alphabetical order by principal proposer's last name.
This workshop aims to break new ground by exploring in a systematic and innovative way the relationship between the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and Development Studies (DS) in the making of world order. It will engage the history and core assumptions of IR and DS as they have emerged as constitutive elements of the Cold War and post Cold War world order, placing emphasis on how both disciplines inform and are informed by contemporary international security and economic/development policies, diplomatic transactions and questions of global governance.
Of particular focus will be the significance of liberal internationalism -- especially the democratic peace thesis -- in IR and the influential idea of 'development as freedom' now prominent in DS. These key ideas inform the dominant institutional approaches to international diplomacy, economic development policy and global security practice in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era. More specifically,they inform policies aimed at poverty alleviation and political stability, which are at the centre of the ongoing debates about the macro-level conditions required for the realization of peace and plenty in the world today. We hope to draw attention to the serious limitations of the dominant approaches to both global inequality and international security as pat of current efforts to 'rethink' international relations, security and development frameworks.
Sexual violence and exploitation is endemic in war-affected regions, and babies are often produced as a result. It has been estimated that tens of thousands of children have resulted from mass rape campaigns or sexual exploitation during times of war in the last decade. According to anecdotal reports, these Ņwar babiesÓ Š children fathered by soldiers on the wrong side of a conflict - often face stigma, discrimination and even infanticide.
Yet almost no systematic data exists assessing their status and fate from a human rights perspective. To address this gap, I wish to convene a workshop that will provide a forum for those scholars beginning work on the subject of war babies to come together, as well as an opportunity to encourage other scholars and practitioners to engage with sexual exploitation and forced pregnancy from a childrenÕs human rights perspective. This workshop will result in an ISA panel in 2005, as well as, eventually, an edited volume that should lay a foundation for future research on the subject.
We are applying to the ISA Grant Program to hold a one-day workshop titled "Theoretical and Methodological Advances in the Study of Leaders." We plan to hold the workshop in May 2004, and to offer its three panels for the 2005 ISA annual meeting within the Scientific Study of Conflict Processes section. Recent work in comparative politics and international relations has shown a marked shift towards leaders as the theoretical and empirical units of analysis. To promote this emerging research agenda, we propose to hold a workshop to evaluate recent theoretical and methodological developments in the study of leaders as the main unit of analysis in international relations and comparative politics. We seek to bring together a group of scholars with diverse methodological and substantive perspectives on how leaders shape policy. The two conveners intend to solicit papers from the participants in the workshop with as our ultimate coal either a special issue of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal or an edited volume with a major academic press. We would hope the collected papers would provide a fruitful basis for the rapidly burgeoning study of leaders in both comparative politics and international relations.
Until recently, almost all studies that focused on leaders in international relations examined theories of diversionary war. This vast literature broadly postulates that as leaders become more likely to lose office, they become more likely to become involved in an international conflict, because such conflict has the potential to boost their time in office. A central shortcoming in this literature was the paucity of available data on leaders other than American presidents and British prime-ministers. The two conveners have independently created new global data sets of leaders for the periods 1919-1999 and 1900 -2000. We believe this new data has the potential to open up important new empirical research Š particularly in international relations Š when scholars focus no longer almost exclusively on countries or country-years as the empirical unit of analysis but now also have the opportunity to focus on leaders or leader-years as the empirical unit of analysis.
Over the course of the past decade, there has been a burgeoning literature on the role and influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in international relations. Focusing on different issue areas ranging from the environment, to development and human rights, scholars have examined the role of these non-state actors in global governance. In this respect their strategies or tactics, their impact on agenda-setting in international organizations, the creation of new norms or the enforcement of norms by NGOs and their implementation at the national level has been of particular interest. Furthermore, questions regarding the emergence of a global civil society or the consequences for states' sovereignty have also been addressed. Much of this work has been based on single cases. To this date, and apart from few exceptions, there is little comparative work in existence. However, with the growing engagement of NGOs in different international organizations ranging from organizations such as the UN, to the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF and the European Union, there is a growing need for a more systematic comparison that helps to reveal general patterns of NGO participation and influence in international organizations.
The workshop seeks to help fill this gap in the literature, by contrasting the presence and influence of non-governmental organizations in two particular organizations: the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU). The focus on these two organizations seems warranted for several reasons. First, they exhibit interesting differences with respect to their membership and their objectives that allow us to determine the conditions under which NGOs can be more or less successful. While the United Nations is an organization with universal membership and a broad focus, the membership of the EU is particular and its focus, although changing, still rather narrow. Second, evidence of recent studies suggests that there is much cross-fertilization between the UN and the European Union with ideas and norms developed at the international level frequently being diffused to the supranational level. Nevertheless, little systematic research exists on how the two levels are linked, through what processes these ideas or norms are carried from the international to regional organizations, and what role non-governmental actors play in this respect. Third, based on the assumption that the EU is sui genre -- neither a conventional organization nor a state -- the impact of non-governmental organizations has largely been studied in isolation. This project seeks to probe this uniqueness thesis. Concurrent with constructivist thinking, we assume the EU to be embedded in a broader normative and institutional international context. It therefore will be of interest to what extent the activities and practices of non-state actors at the supranational level are affected by and comparable to those at the international level.
Since Stanley Hoffman's (1977) seminal depiction of international relations as an American social science, it has become commonplace to affirm that IR is not "international" at all, but rather characterized by the pervasiveness of Anglo-American modes of thought and their respective conceptual and spatial boundaries. Recent research on the state of the field suggests that the overall nature of IR has changed very little. IR's primary conceptual tools, although sorely inadequate for understanding key global problems and dynamics, have yet to be replaced; few contributions from the non-core are recognized as legitimate ways of thinking about international politics; and scant dialogue exists among competing perspectives.
Notwithstanding the inflexibility of our field, during the past ten years systematic efforts have in fact been made to explore it, while debate concerning the irrelevance of standard IR terminology, perspectives and theories for many "peripheral" situations has also grown considerably. The former has taken four basic forms: post-positivist critiques of IR rooted in the third debate; historiography of IR; sociology of science; and national variations of "American social science", usually rooted in the comparison between the United States and Europe. The latter has led to critical literatures on the need to think differently about international relations in "third world" contexts. Such initiatives have included: analyses of the misfit between numerous core concepts (among them, power, security, sovereignty and the state) and narratives with peripheral realities and problems; the examination of national and regional IR perspectives different from those of the United States and Europe; and the identification and analysis of representational practices in IR discourses and their role in perpetuating subordinate relations between core and periphery.
In order to address these issues in-depth, we propose to hold a one-day workshop in conjunction with the 2004 ISA convention in Montreal. The primary objective of this workshop is to bring together a group of 30-40 scholars from and/or working in peripheral settings, along with several senior level non-mainstream scholars from the core to discuss the publication of an edited volume series on "geo-cultural epistemologies in IR". The general platform for this discussion will be provided by six panels and two roundtables that we presented for next year's meeting -- at the request of ISA president Steve Smith -- on the conference theme, "Hegemony and its Discontents: power, ideology and knowledge in the study and practice of international relations". We have invited an important group of scholars from throughout the world to participate in a critical reflection concerning the ways in which the geographical and cultural sides of hegemony shape, enable and condition particular forms of scholarship. Papers will be presented on three topics key to IR theorizing today -- security, authority/state, globalization -- in order to examine how each is problematized differently in non-core contexts. We also organized three panels on the question of IR knowledge in peripheral portions of the globe. The first of these will explore the development of the discipline in a given country or region; the second will examine the influence of distinct factors upon IR teaching and research; and the third will address the more general issue of IR thinking in the periphery.
Proposals are arranged in alphabetical order by principal proposer's last name. The "solicited grant supplement" was a special program initiated by ISA President John Vasquez for "state of the discipline" panels in 2003; these funds were only available in the 2002-2003 period.
The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for feminist international relations scholars to discuss the methodological contributions feminists have brought to the IR field and to feminist scholarship. The workship is designed both to provide a forum for reflection over what feminist scholars have already accomplished in terms of developing a specifically feminist methodology for the study of global politics, as well as to identify areas for further development. The extended purpose of the workshop is to bring together a diverse collection of scholars to contribute to an edited volume on feminist methodology and IR. The volume is envisioned as a much-needed text in graduate studies and as a guidebook to how to actually do feminist international relations. This would be a unique volume filling an obvious gap in scholarship.
We propose to hold a workshop to evaluate the present state of the study of international environmental politics and to propose future research and study directions in this field. The three workshop proposers are developing a book project on the same topic. The proposal, which was solicited by a major publisher in the field, is currently under review. The proposed workshop participants have agreed to write chapters for the book in addition to participating in the workshop.
The proposed workshop would take place at an intermediate stage in the development of the book manuscript. We are asking all authors to circulate a draft of their assigned chapters before the workshop. At the workshop itself, the participants will discuss the chapters individually and assess the emerging work as a whole. Since all of the participants also teach in the field of international environmental politics, the workshop will be an invaluable opportunity for us as editors to have the scope and integrity of the whole book evaluated by its intended audience. On the basis of their collective advice, we may invite additional contributors to ensure that the volume truly covers the range of the field. Individual authors will also receive editorial suggestions to incorporate in the final versions of their chapters. In addition, the workshop will provide each author the opportunity to respond to and build on other chapters.
This proposal requests airfare to bring five international scholars to a workshop, "Reacquainting Security Studies and International Political Economy," to be co-hosted in Providence, RI, by the U.S. Naval War College (represented by Peter Dombrowski) and the Watson Institute for International Studies (represented by Sue Eckert). Sue Eckert and Peter Dombrowski are co-organizers of an ongoing collaborative project, Economics and International Security (EIS). Workshop participants will present draft chapters of a forthcoming edited volume, "The Political Economy of International Security" to be published by Lynne Reinner as part of the newly re-launched International Political Economy Yearbook series under the general editorship ob Nicola Phillips and Chris May. The workshop will help integrate the individual chapters into a coherent edited volume by asking chapter authors to address a common set of theoretical and conceptual questions and to consider the practical policy implications of their research. Based on the exchanges that take place during the meeting, authors will be asked to redraft their chapters in view of suggestions made by moderators and the other participants.
What difference do regimes make in world politics? How effective are they at solving the problems that states create them to address? More generally, what effects do they hav, under what conditions do they have them., and by what mechanisms do they operate? The workshop proposers have initiated a major project that seeks to answer these and other questions related to regime effects and effectiveness. The project will produce an edited volume that develops theoretical themes regarding the broad determinants of regime effects and effectiveness by examining more contingent claims about regime dynamics in particular issue areas. The project seeks to further our knowledge of the impact of regimes on the behavior, interests, and identities of state and non-state actors by fostering greater communication among scholars working on different substantive issues (security, international political economy, human rights, and environmental protection) and greater integration of their insights.
One of the most noted transformations in international security since the end of the Cold War has been the emergence of new threats, such as terrorism, transnational crime, civil war and the proliferation of small arms. However, while it has been widely acknowledged that states are increasingly pressed to deal with these threats, little systematic research has been done on the possibilities and dangers of using non-governmental organizations, private security companies and international organizations to complement state capabilities. This workshop seeks to address this gap by bringing together a group of innovative scholars working in both fields for an exchange of ideas and insights.
Specifically, the workshop will be structured around four panels examining the involvement of non-state actors in civil war, terrorism and transnational crime, infectious diseases, such as AIDS, and the proliferation of small arms. Using the concept of global governance as a theoretical template, the panels will discuss both the possibilities and the problems of a growing role of non-state actors in addressing these threats. The implications of this project are wide-ranging. In particular, they should help identify how states can reconcile growing global security commitments with diminishing financial resources by examining the positive role which non-state actors can play in international security.
It has become commonplace for scholars and elite decision makers alike to point to the emergence of a global community, a McWorld of shared goals, values, identifications, etc. New communications technologies fuel these impressions. The explosion of the internet, email, video-conferencing and other forms of media seems to suggest that if people communicate enough, they will know each other and a common humanity will emerge. Of course, corporations are among the non-state actors capitalizing on this system, in an attempt to instill a consumer identity. Transnational social movements are also deeply engaged in promoting their own agendas for peace and social justice, but they are responding to the downside of globalization (cf. Alger 1997: 270; Smith 1997; Zunnes, Kurtz and Asher 1999; Ackermann 2000).
Do emancipatory movements have the power to counter hegemonic influence? Do they offer an alternative method of social transformation to violent anti-Western movements? Are emancipatory movements articulating new sites of global democracy? Do they overlap with or challenge a liberal regime of global governance? Do new media technologies give transnational movements an edge in articulating global democracy, or do they limit its reach and legitimacy?
To answer these questions, we propose to gather a group of 8 scholars (5 junior and 4 mid-career) from the United States and other countries of origin (including Finland, Egypt, and Canada) to author an edited volume on the "Politics of Global Arrogance." In support of this goal, we propose to hold a workshop in conjunction with the 2003 ISA Conference in Portland, Oregon.
For the past 25 years there has been a widening gap between the theoretical study and empirical reality of international organizations. Extant state-centric theories within both realism and neo-liberalism conceive of international governmental institutions as little more than forums for interstate bargaining. The "great debate" of the 1980s and 1990s centered on whether IOs actually influenced the probability or depth of cooperation among states by altering state preferences, the credibility of state commitments, or the amount of information available to states. This focus on IOs as structural constraints on state behavior is ironic given the increasing power of IOs as actors in their own right over the past 25 years. Increasingly, IOs are not merely forums that shape interaction among states, but relatively autonomous global agents with the authority to make policy, regulate state behavior, set the agenda for state decision makers, and even make legally binding decisions that impinge on state sovereignty. Hence, while it has been long in coming, a second generation of scholars has made IO design, behavior and change the empirical and conceptual focus of their work.
While we applaud this renewed interest in the study of international organizations, the current debate among this second generation of IO scholars suffers from a deep division along the so-called "rationalist-constructivist divide" . Typically, constructivists claim that rationalist approaches, such as liberal institutional and principal-agent models, omit the most important variables in their analysis or rely on implausible assumptions and a narrow deductive logic that lead to thin caricatures of the socio-political life within and around IOs. Alternatively, rationalists assert that constructivist claims, inductively derived from historical and sociological analysis, are non-falsifiable. Often they simply ignore constructivist research altogether. Studies that actually attempt to test alternative hypotheses derived from constructivist and rationalist models with carefully selected cases are the rare exception.
This division in the study of IOs has been created and reinforced by meta-theoretical obstinacy more than deductive rigor or systematic empirical tests. A similar observation recently led two prominent scholars to argue that the rationalist-constructivist divide has been overstated and that the two approaches are more compatible on a meta-theoretical level than previously imagined. Further, in a series of essays emerging from the 2000 ISA meeting in Los Angeles that was edited by Frank Harvey and Michael Brecher, numerous authors pointed to the lack of theoretical synthesis between different approaches as a major obstacle to the accumulation of knowledge in IR. Unsurprisingly, theoretical and methodological agnostics who closely observe the Ōreal worldÕ of IOs often find existing approaches inadequate to explain observed variation in their chosen cases. Thus, in attempts to develop more complete explanations for issues such as IO design, delegation, behavior and change, these scholars often find it necessary to accessorize their preferred approaches with numerous caveats and ad hoc amendments that are not consistent with the core of extant theories. Such degenerative amendments lead to conceptual fuzziness that makes the accumulation of knowledge across the field of IO study almost impossible. Absent some clear models for linking rationalist and constructivist explanations, researchers are unable to achieve theoretical precision and empirical rigor beyond single case studies. It is now the task of empirically oriented scholars to move beyond the hopeful meta-theoretical ruminations of Fearon and Wendt and create actual synthetic models that have explanatory utility.
With this goal in mind we propose a joint project involving both rationalist and constructivist scholars who are committed to testing the plausibility of synthetic approaches that can guide empirical research on international organizations. This project is a self-conscious attempt at bridge building. At a bare minimum the project aims to open a dialogue between opposing scholarly camps and make informed judgements about the efficacy of establishing such connections between different theoretical traditions. In its most ambitious form, the project seeks to offer viable hypotheses derived from synthetic models that apply to a range of cases spanning the breadth of IO types and issue-areas. Based on preliminary conversations, we expect authors to employ a range of statistical methods, comparative case studies and process tracing methodologies. While a number of prominent senior scholars are involved in the project as discussants and authors of the framing chapters, this project has been organized and almost all the substantive chapters will be written by young scholars as indicated in the ISA Workshop Grant guidelines. Participants in the workshop represent seven different countries and are drawn from the fields of comparative politics, economics, and international relations.
(proposals are arranged in alphabetical order by principal proposer's last name; this information is from the 2002 ISA Governing Council Agenda)
Amount Requested: $10,500
Amount Funded: $6000
The Contending Perspectives on Global Governance Workshop will explore the issue of global governance by bringing together scholars from a variety of analytical perspectives, across disciplinary lines, and around the world. Workshop participants will take part in focused discussions on the ways that world developments may call for new conceptual and practical approaches to questions of global governance and world politics. Specifically, participants will explore ideas about global governance, a term that is increasingly invoked by scholarly and policymaking communities to describe the dynamics and demands of post-Cold War world politics. As yet, however, there is little consensus or dialogue about what global governance is or would entail. In holding this workshop, the workshop aims to clarify and assess the utility of global governance as a concept and approach to world politics in relation to world changes. Participants will also address methods for transmitting knowledge about global governance to students at various levels—undergraduate, master/practitioner, and Ph.D. The workshop will take the form of an ongoing dialogue comprised of two separate conferences, held over the course of 18 months, the final product being a scholarly book on the conceptual and practical utility of global governance, with chapters from the main participants as well as commentary from discussants.
Amount Requested: $6225
Amount
Funded: $6225
This workshop focuses on the consequences of the social forces of unprotected work for international and transnational relations. By “unprotected work,” we mean those producers who are not socially organized through workplace organizations and are increasingly unprotected by a weakened or unwilling state apparatus. People in these circumstances are by far the majority of working people and are crucial to the functioning of the global political economy, yet the role of these social forces is largely neglected in the study of world politics. The workshop participants will address a series of interrelated questions. First, the workshop will address the question of the ontology of international relations. Second, workshop participants will address the issue of subject formation through public spheres. Third, the workshop will investigate the relationship between modes of social organization and of mobilization. Fourth, the workshop will look into the “spillovers” from the emergence of new forms of social and political mobilization into political society. Finally, the workshop will address the implications of the analysis of global politics from the optic of labor for international relations scholarship.
Amount requested:
$7425
Amount
Funded: $5000
The purpose of the collaborate project of which this workshop will form a central part is to address the role of institutions as moral agents in international relations. In other words, this project seeks to explore whether collectivities such as states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), transnational corporations, intergovernmental organizations and, perhaps, international society itself can be considered to be moral actors and bearers of duties. It also endeavours to examine what such an assumption would mean for our understanding of international relations. How would it challenge existing theoretical frameworks? How would it affect our approach to practical problems in international relations? What would it mean for policy-making prescriptions? By addressing these questions, this project aims to introduce an important new research agenda to the study of international relations.
The theme of this workshop — which follows on from a workshop held in Cambridge, U.K. in November 2000 — demands that some of the difficult cases broached in the first meeting be discussed in detail. Do some institutions, and circumstances, provide particularly challenging problems for the claim that institutions can be assigned duties? Addressing the ‘hard cases’ in international relations for discussing the responsibilities of institutions requires that the theoretical framework already proposed for the project be tested in the context of particular events (such as the Kosovo campaign and the genocide in Rwanda) and in relations to specific institutions (such as the European Union, NATO and the United Nations).
Amount
Requested: $4500
Amount
Funded: $4500
This workshop seeks to address many of the issues raised by the recent resurgence of interest in issues of identity and culture among scholars of International Relations. The workshop will be organized around four of the features most prevalent in discussions of identity and International Relations: alterity, the fluidity and dynamism of identities, the multiplicity of identities, and the constructedness of identities. We seek to explore these four features in an effort to unpack and theorize their implications for empirical work. In order to reflect the numerous and varied scholarly voices currently working on issues of identity and international relations, we have invited a number of predominantly junior, but also middle-level, scholars to participate in this workshop. In addition, we have invited participants from the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Norway to reflect the diversity of international perspectives on these issues. We consider these IR scholars to be representative of a “second-wave” of identity scholarship in which empirical research is strengthening and expanding the theoretical advances made in the past decade.
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a notable resurgence of interest in issues of identity and culture among scholars of International Relations (Lapid and Kratochwil, 1996; Katzenstein, 1996). While it is unlikely that identity and culture have suddenly emerged as factors in world politics, they are getting new, and in some cases renewed, attention as components of political science explanations of events and policies in the international arena.
IR paradigms dominant since the 1950s bracketed factors that might be associated with identity, in large part due to the manner in which so-called mainstream scholars conceptualized world politics. For example, neorealists identify the state as the primary actor in the international arena. States tend to be viewed as rational, unitary actors, thus discouraging any effort to “look inside” them to see what groups might be implicated in the policy process or what concerns, other than those relating to the preservation of state sovereignty, might motivate them. These questions have traditionally been left to scholars of comparative (read: domestic) politics. As a result, mainstream IR scholarship tended to assume that identity existed prior to the issues and events that formed the object of their inquiries. Katzenstein (1996) notes, for example, that (f)or realists, culture and identity are, at best, derivative of the distribution of capabilities and have no independent explanatory power. For rationalists, actors deploy culture and identity strategically, like any other resource, simply to further their own self-interests
Amount
Requested: $9293.60
Amount
Funded: $5000
Sex trafficking reflects a human tragedy of global proportions. An $8 billion/year global business, it prostitutes almost four million people daily (IOM, 1997a, 1997b, 1996). Crime cartels utilize high-tech equipment, including weapons of war, to defend this lucrative trade. In Thailand alone, the sex economy (including drugs, smuggling, prostitution, and gambling along with trafficking in persons) raked in $11-18 billion from 1993-1995, amounting to 8-13% of the country’s GDP (Truong, 2000).
Sex trafficking thus racializes and sexualizes inequities between rich and poor, North and South, men and women, adults and children within as well as between countries. It is no coincidence that most targets of sex trafficking are considered “prostitutes of color” (including ethnic Caucasians from Russia and Eastern Europe) coming from poor, desperate economies (even if many are well-educated) while their clients are simply identified as “rich” (implying at least a middle-class background for men and sometimes women from the North, men from Japan and other wealthy economies in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East).
Of particular concern is an increasing connection beween peacekeeping and prostitution. Though much-needed to stabilize warring regions in the world (e.g., Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Guatemala, Albania, Western Sahara), peacekeepers under the auspices of the United Nations (UN) are trafficking in sex for both pleasure and profit. The Associated Press in Eastern Europe reports, for instance, that UN “officers forged documents for trafficked women, aided their illegal transport through border checkpoints into Bosnia, and tipped off sex club owners ahead of raids” (Kole and Cerkez-Robinson, 2001). Serbs and Albanians in the region have little trouble in overcoming their political-ethnic differences to collaborate in the prostitution business, couping $1.5 million/week (Kelmendi, 2001). Similar scenarios recur throughout the UN peacekeeping network, raising apprehension within the UN itself (Times of India, 11 April 2001).
Amount Requested: $3000
Amount Funded: $3000
Since World War II, a rather intimate relationship has developed between IR and the U.S. government. For example, Yale University’s Institute of International Studies, home of many of the discipline’s leading scholars in the early postwar years, served as an auxiliary research arm of the State Department. Deterrence theory, to use another example, was largely developed in the USAF-sponsored RAND Corporation. A recent magazine article reported that, though Vietnam drove a wedge between the government and social scientists, since the end of the Cold War collaboration between IR scholars U.S. intelligence agencies have been flourishing. Paradoxically, at the same time that IR has become attached to national interests, it has increasingly come to understand itself as a detached, disinterested science.
As Alexander Wendt observed, the majority of contemporary IR scholars are committed to a, broadly speaking, “positivist” epistemology. Positivism, as Kratochwil and Ruggie put it, “Before it does anything else, . . . posits a radical separation of subject and object.” The goal of the workshop is to explore the theoretical and epistemological ramifications of the seeming incongruity between the presupposition of subject/object separation, which prevails in the mainstream of the discipline, and the actual history of IR’s implication in the politics which it studies.
The workshop will be held at the University of Florida on March 22-23, 2002. Participants will include Ido Oren (organizer), Friedrich Kratochwil, David Campbell, R.B.J. Walker, Sammy Barkin and Daniel Monk. The workshop is projected to result in an edited volume or special journal issue.
Amount
Requested: $6400
Amount
Funded: $5000
Participants in the workshop on Institutions, Knowledge and Environmental Politics will (1) discuss the leading approaches to institutions and knowledge; (2) consider each in light of case studies; and (3) develop a prospectus for an edited manuscript. The first panel will bring together at least two approaches to institutions and knowledge: the coproduction model and action theory. The second panel will cover (a) intellectual property rights and access to genetic material; (b) institutions to enhance local community knowledge and participation in India; (c) the science of climate change.
Amount
Requested: $1342
Amount
Funded: $1342
This one-day workshop will be held on Saturday, March 23, 2002 at Tulane University, New Orleans. It is supported by the International Studies Association (ISA), the Environmental Studies Section of the ISA, the Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda at the University of Maryland, and American University. It is open to all Environmental Studies Section members (with a cap of 60 participants).
The workshop aims to cull recent understandings of fundamental issues in global environmental politics in an effort to stimulate new research agendas. Scholars of International Relations have been studying transnational and global environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Over the past few decades, the number and quality of environmental challenges have changed as have political institutions and movements attempting to respond. Additionally, theoretical understandings of politics and knowledge have evolved creating a lively, complex and, at times, sprawling discipline. Amidst these changes, perennial issues continue to demand thought and attention. For example: What are the main causes of environmental harm? How do we explain the emergence, and account for the performance, of international environmental regimes? What role do nonstate actors play in global environmental governance? How effective is international or global environmental policy? The workshop will create a forum in which ESS members can reflect together on these issues and articulate potential areas for future research.
The workshop will consist of a set of discussion groups (of approximately 20 participants each) organized around the themes mentioned above. No formal presentations will be made; rather, questions will be posed to stimulate sustained conversation. Each session will be led by a facilitator who will moderate discussion and ensure that the conversation flows and moves in important directions. The idea is to generate as much participatory deliberation as possible. Each participant will submit a single-page paper on one of the four issue areas to be discussed. Papers will be posted on a webpage and will serve as background to the discussions. Aside from identifying and clarifying future lines of research, the workshop will also serve to bring more intellectual cohesion to the Environmental Studies Section.
There have been
visits to this site since 21 June 2002.