Diplomazia creativa al servizio di strategie di nicchia di una piccola potenza

In the year marking the centenary since the foundation of the Azerbaijani Diplomatic Service, Baku’s foreign policy is increasingly characterised by a broader understanding of diplomacy, shaped by the gradual yet steady expansion of both areas and the tools for intervention. Guided by the attempt to develop a ‘niche strategy’ aiming at safeguarding and promoting Azerbaijani national interest, the Humanitarian Diplomacy emerges as a privileged field for Baku to adopt a pro-active and creative foreign policy. Building upon the debate around the interests behind the aid-providing activities of traditional and emerging donors, the article aims at introducing the motivations and the aims behind Azerbaijani aid policy. In particular, it aims at demonstrating that Baku’s Humanitarian Diplomacy aims chiefly at achieving immaterial benefits, having to do with international prestige and with the construction and international projection of a Good International Citizenship

Shape shifting: civilizational discourse and the analysis of cross-cultural interaction in the constitution of international society

The concept of civilization is intrinsic to the English School's understanding of international society. At the same time, engagement with discourses of civilization has been an important site of contestation within the English School, with quite different narratives of the evolution, structures and dynamics of international society being articulated. I argue that deeper analysis of how different waves of English School scholars engage with discourses of civilization provides a valuable pathway for mapping the evolution of English School thought and its understanding of the structure and dynamics of international society. Discourse analysis, a method firmly embedded in interpretivist approaches, can provide us with a valuable approach to unravel the complexities of English School thinking about civilization. Applying discourse analysis to these bodies of work allows us to explore nodal points within English School debates, the layering of particular texts, and how scholars engage with strategies of juxtapositioning and counternarrative in order to reveal how subjects are positioned in hierarchies of authority and reveal previously subjugated voices in their interpretations of the constitution and evolution of international society

The West: a securitising community?

The primary objective of this article is to theorise transformations of Western order in a manner that does not presuppose a fixed understanding of 'the West' as a pre-constituted political space, ready-made and waiting for social scientific enquiry. We argue that the Copenhagen School's understanding of securitisation dynamics provides an adequate methodological starting point for such an endeavour. Rather than taking for granted the existence of a Western 'security community', we thus focus on the performative effects of a security semantics in which 'the West' figures as the threatened, yet notoriously vague referent object that has to be defended against alleged challenges. The empirical part of the article reconstructs such securitisation dynamics in three different fields: the implications of representing China's rise as a challenge to Western order, the effects of the transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards a global security actor, and the consequences of extraordinary renditions and practices of torture for the normative infrastructure of 'the West'. We conclude that Western securitisation dynamics can be understood as a discursive shift away from a legally enshrined culture of restraint and towards more assertive forms of self-authorisation