Y a-t-il une voie au-delà du positivisme ? Les approches critiques et le débat épistémologique en relations internationales

Cet article examine le débat épistémologique en relations internationales (ri) et les critiques à l’endroit du positivisme. Il avance que les approches critiques ne parviennent pas à préciser suffisamment quel est le problème du positivisme. On ne sait jamais à quoi pourrait ressembler une épistémologie postpositiviste. Ce texte met l’emphase sur la contribution des poststructuralistes en montrant comment le rôle central de la différence dans la construction du sens explique pourquoi nos théories sont toujours indépendantes du monde qu’elles analysent, sans toutefois être arbitraires. Il s’éloigne cependant de la stratégie de la déconstruction, en affirmant que reconnaître le rôle que joue la différence au niveau épistémologique offre un terrain sur lequel peut s’ériger une nouvelle forme de rigueur analytique que nous qualifions ici de critique.This paper surveys the epistemological debate in International Relations and reassesses criticisms of positivism. Critical approaches have often failed to specify the problem of positivism. It thus remains unclear whether there is a path beyond it. This article focuses on the poststructuralist contribution to this debate, which comes closer to correctly identifying why positivism reifies international relations. Indeed, poststructuralists have correctly identified how the role of difference in the construction of meaning illustrates why our theories are always independant from the world they supposedly describe, although not arbitrary. The article moves away from deconstruction and argues that recognizing the centrality of difference can instead offer a field on which to conceptualize a new form of analytical and critical rigour

Macro-finance and the financialisation of economic policy

Reflecting on the broad ambitions of macro-finance, I argue that the commitment to placing finance at the centre of our economic conceptions comes with significant risks that speak directly to the politics of financialisation. By redirecting the focus of economic governance towards finance, macro-finance may consolidate rather than challenge the problematic trends of global finance. More specifically, I argue that the focus of the money view on liquidity has contributed to depoliticising financial governance and aligning it further with the demands of financialisation

Patient capital in the age of financialized managerialism

This article focuses on the history of financialized management and its connections to shareholder value, which is often viewed as undermining patient strategies of investments. We argue that the rise of financialized management has in fact a long history that goes back to the conglomerate movement in 1960s America. As we show, the conglomerates pioneered the use of financial markets as a baseline for strategy, and the emphasis on financial transactions as an engine for growth. They developed key techniques—high leverage, share-price maximization and accounting manipulation—that later came to be associated with managerial strategies of the shareholder value era. This legacy has important implications for how we think about patient capital. It challenges the idea that patient capital consists foremost in shielding non-financial companies from capital markets and highlights the central role of management too often neglected in these debates

Rethinking neoliberalism after the Polanyian turn

The last two decades have seen an explosion of writings about neoliberalism insisting on the role of the state as a key architect of market dynamics. Drawing substantially from the work of Karl Polanyi, this literature has emphasised in various ways the socially constructed nature of neoliberalism. But as I argue, conceptual flaws in Polanyi’s conception of 19th liberal governance have helped perpetuate an ongoing reliance on the notion of the Market despite the recognition that there is no such thing as a self-regulated Market. Criticising the turn to Polanyi, I show how this has directed our gaze towards the rhetorical claims of neoliberal governance, at the expense of a reflection on its institutional features. The article then suggests avenues for reconfiguring the study of neoliberalism without recourse to the problematic notion of the Market

The antinomies of political Marxism: a historicist reply to critics

This is a response to the contributions to the symposium on our initial article, ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’

Neoliberal failures and the managerial takeover of governance

The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost. Often overlooked in this narrative is how far actually existing neoliberalism strayed from the original designs of public choice theorists and neoliberal ideologues. By examining the history of the Thatcher government's public sector reforms, we demonstrate how neoliberal plans for marketisation ran aground, forcing neoliberal governments to turn to an approach of Managed Competition that owed more to practices of postwar planning born in Cold War US than neoliberal theory. Rather than impose a market-like transformation of the public sector, Managed Competition systematically empowered top managers and turned governance into a managerial process; two developments that ran directly against core precepts of neoliberalism. The history of these early failures and adjustments provides vital insights into the politics of managerial governance in the neoliberal era

Bourdieu and the dead end of reflexivity: on the impossible task of locating the subject

This article examines recent attempts by IR scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our subjective biases through reflexive means. But as I argue Bourdieu – like most reflexive scholars – largely overestimated his ability to grasp his own subject position. For he assumed he could be objective about the very thing he had the least reasons to be objective about: himself. Instead of bending over backwards in this way and directly take the subject into account, I then propose to rearticulate the problematic of reflexivity by going back to a more classic concern with the question of alienation. Through a detailed critique of Bourdieu's reflexive approach and the ways in which it was received in IR, I set out a series of principles to reconfigure the agenda of reflexivity and offer a platform for a proper methodological alternative to positivism

Managers, not markets

Neoliberal policy owes less to the ideology of free-markets than it does the planning techniques born in Cold War America

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection