Agency, Values, and Well-Being: A Human Development Model

This paper argues that feelings of agency are linked to human well-being through a sequence of adaptive mechanisms that promote human development, once existential conditions become permissive. In the first part, we elaborate on the evolutionary logic of this model and outline why an evolutionary perspective is helpful to understand changes in values that give feelings of agency greater weight in shaping human well-being. In the second part, we test the key links in this model with data from the World Values Surveys using ecological regressions and multi-level models, covering some 80 societies worldwide. Empirically, we demonstrate evidence for the following sequence: (1) in response to widening opportunities of life, people place stronger emphasis on emancipative values, (2) in response to a stronger emphasis on emancipative values, feelings of agency gain greater weight in shaping people’s life satisfaction, (3) in response to a greater impact of agency feelings on life satisfaction, the level of life satisfaction itself rises. Further analyses show that this model is culturally universal because taking into account the strength of a society’s western tradition does not render insignificant these adaptive linkages. Precisely because of its universality, this is indeed a ‘human’ development model in a most general sense

Towards a social-relational dialectic for world politics

Dialectics remains an underutilized methodology in contemporary IR theory, which represents a significant limitation to the study of world politics, particularly in under-standing processes of transformation and change - an oversight that this article intends to redress. This article has two primary goals. First, it aims to reconstruct and build upon the small but robust debate concerning the validity of dialectics in IR that has been championed previously by Alker and Biersteker, and Heine and Teschke, respectively. Second, it contrasts dialectical and deterministic approaches to IR, as exemplified in Coxian Critical Theory and neo-realism, as a means to showcase the merits of the former as an approach to the study of social change in world politics. The ultimate aim of the article is to offer the groundwork of a social-relational dialectical approach to world politics that is focused on the intersubjective engagements between human beings, which can be developed in future research. Through such an analytic, the dialectical processes in social life are shown to be open-ended and the article rejects any understanding of 'inevitable' progress/regress or teleological end point. On the one hand, this account of dialectics promises greater analytical potential for understanding processes of change in world politics but, on the other, indicates the potential for the irrational toleration of contradiction and antagonism as an accepted feature of social life. Ultimately, the article argues that the skilled dialectician should emphasize human agency and intersubjectivity within a social-relational dialectical approach to world politics