Intergovernmental Organizations and the Determinants of Member State Interest Convergence

In this dissertation, I ask: Which attributes of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are conducive to member state interest convergence? Scholars testing the effects of IGOs on state behavior usually control for state interests in order to counter realist arguments. However, by doing so, they may be missing one channel through which IGOs ultimately affect state behavior - through changes in state interests. While research on socialization informs the study of interest convergence, it is insufficient to answer the question of which attributes of IGOs make them conducive to state interest convergence. These studies consist largely of case studies with which one cannot easily control for material factors that affect member state interests and they focus on the induction of new member states into an existing community. I argue instead that all states are subject to the acceptance of ideas (both normative and cognitive) that can affect how they define their interests and that it is more appropriate to look at pairs of states to assess their interaction affects their similarity to each other.I argue that greater interaction between member states provides more opportunities for the transmission of ideas between them and therefore greater convergence in how they define their interests. I therefore expect IGOs with more substructures and covering more issues to be more conducive to interest convergence. I also propose that different types of similarity between states (regime type and cultural similarity) can make states predisposed to the acceptance of ideas from one another and thus enhance the degree to which intra-IGO interaction may lead to interest convergence. The aforementioned hypotheses are tested in statistical models, using an original dataset of IGOs or IGO structures as the key independent variables. The findings provide support for the theory that more interaction within IGOs leads to greater interest convergence. The findings with regard to dyadic attributes are mixed, providing support for the idea that dyads with common cultural attributes experience greater interest convergence as a result of interaction within IGOs than other dyads, while domestic regime type similarity has the opposite effect to that expected

Framing the Real: Lefèbvre and NeoRealist Cinematic Space as Practice

In 1945 Roberto Rossellini's Neo-realist Rome, Open City set in motion an approach to cinema and its representation of real life – and by extension real spaces – that was to have international significance in film theory and practice. However, the re-use of the real spaces of the city, and elsewhere, as film sets in Neo-realist film offered (and offers) more than an influential aesthetic and set of cinematic theories. Through Neo-realism, it can be argued that we gain access to a cinematic relational and multidimensional space that is not made from built sets, but by filming the built environment. On the one hand, this space allows us to "notice" the contradictions around us in our cities and, by extension, the societies that have produced those cities, while on the other, allows us to see the spatial practices operative in the production and maintenance of those contradictions. In setting out a template for understanding the spatial practices of Neo-realism through the work of Henri Lefèbvre, this paper opens its films, and those produced today in its wake, to a spatio-political reading of contemporary relevance. We will suggest that the rupturing of divisions between real spaces and the spaces of film locations, as well the blurring of the difference between real life and performed actions for the camera that underlies much of the central importance of Neo-realism, echoes the arguments of Lefèbvre with regard the social production of space. In doing so, we will suggest that film potentially had, and still has, a vital role to play in a critique of contemporary capitalist spatial practices

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton