A leader without followers? The United States in world politics after Bush

This paper argues that while the US might retain the desire, and up to a point the material capacity to lead, it is likely to find itself increasingly without followers. Partly this is because the US is less accepted as a model, partly it is because of differences on specific policies, and partly it is because of the changing foundations of legitimacy in international society. The big issues likely to dominate the international agenda in the coming years are more likely to decrease than to increase the willingness of others to follow the US. The waning of US leadership is not just a consequence of the particular incompetence of the Bush administration over the last 8 years, though that has surely amplified the problem. It reflects deeper changes that make global hegemony by any single power, or even by the West collectively, decreasingly legitimate

War and Globalization: Understanding the Linkage

Major wars between great powers like the two World Wars and the Cold War during the twentieth century, participated to the second globalization process. But dealing with the relations between globalization and war must not be reduced to warfare as an independent variable. For more than two decades, International Relations (IR) scholars have focused on the transformation of war as a result from globalization. The dynamic shrinking of distance on a large scale caused some effects on warfare, on war but also on models and tools in order to understand these dimensions of strategy. What are the effects of globalization on the transformation of war debate? To what extent some new approaches aim at producing an epistemic revolution? This chapter introduces the classic debate between realisms and liberalisms concerning these links between globalization of war. This debate does not change the epistemic beliefs that lead the academic field in IR contrary to the new wars debate initiated by post-clausewitzian approaches that aims at dissolving the modern distinctions: war and peace, combatant and non-combatant, politics and crime. The chapter ends with a third perspective that describes the impacts of globalization—defined as the development of interdependencies at different levels—on the capacity interaction. In this last perspective, globalization is both a context and an opportunity for actors in order to make war …. but also peace. By coming back to Political theory, analysis of war today shows the emergence of a ‘global state of war’

Why anarchy still matters for International Relations: On theories and things

The category of anarchy is conventionally associated with the emergence of an autonomous discipline of International Relations (IR). Recently Donnelly (2015) has argued that anarchy has never been central to IR (hierarchy is more weighty). His criticism targets not just concepts of anarchy but theories of anarchy and thereby expresses an anti-theory ethos tacitly accepted in the discipline. As a form of conceptual atomism, this ethos is hostile to structuralist and normative theories. This paper aims to reinstate theoretical holism against conceptual atomism and to defend the enduring relevance of theories of international anarchy for IR. This is done by revisiting two classic, structuralist accounts of international anarchy articulated in Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (scientific structuralism) and Hedley Bull's Anarchical Society (normative structuralism). It will be shown that both represent coherent theoretical 'wholes' which reveal a more complex relationship between anarchy and hierarchy than supposed by critics, and which recognise the important connection between the structure of international anarchy (whose key players are states) and the value of freedom. The conclusion examines the prospects of normative theories of international anarchy and 'anarchical' freedom in a globalising world where state agency is being challenged