Political and Social Sciences

The origin of this conceptual analysis lies in a basic puzzle. How did power analysis increasingly turn from a defense to a critique of realism? I shall argue that the turn from realism to neorealism, with its consequent reliance on
economic methodology, in fact diminished the substantial range of the original concept of power. This article will contend that taking power analysis seriously leads beyond neorealism.
Some recent studies by authors dissatisfied with neorealism have attempted to widen the power concept to include what has been called structural power. Their common claim is that the focus on strategic interaction or the bargaining
level of analysis does not capture important power phenomena. I shall argue that these notions of structural power involve three distinct meanings, of which
only one can be shown to be compatible with the interactionist choice-theoretical power concept that underlies the neorealist approach.
Finally, this essay claims  that none of  the structural power concepts is able to provide both a comprehensive and a coherent power analysis, either because it still omits particular power phenomena or because it overloads the concept of power. Instead of pursuing the track of continuously widening the concept, this article will propose a pair or dyad of concepts. The word "power" will be
reserved as an agent concept, and the term "governance" will represent effects not due to a particular agent, whether individual or collective. More generally, I shall use the term "power analysis" to encompass both concepts and to deal
with the link between power and international governance.

Kratochwil stands out as one of those very few thinkers in international relations (IR) whose work tries to understand the implications of thinking assumptions about ontology, social theory, and scientific discovery (and, indeed, ethics) in
parallel. The present article reconstructs the thought of Friedrich Kratochwil to exemplify the necessary coherence of thought from politics to science to ethics, a project which is truly important for the development of theorising in IR. And at the same time, it uses this reconstruction of his multi-layered coherence for portraying a significantly different understanding of a central thinker in IR. For my
reconstruction presents this very quest for coherence as Kratochwil’s underlying theme and the role of practice as the bridge between the different layers of his theorising. As a result, for him, there cannot be Realpolitik without politics, theory without reflexivity, science without judgement, or ethics without a humanist sense of responsibility.

Several analysts have explained the end of the postwar political system in Italy as an effect of the end of the Cold War. Deprived of the anti-communist glue, Italians were, so the story goes, finally free to replace the corrupted regime. The present article argues instead that the recent changes should be seen as the effect of transnational and societal dynamics on modern welfare states that have upset the consociational/clientelistic bargain on which Italy's domestic political economy rested. The success of the judiciary campaign mani pulite (‘clean hands’) has been triggered by the concomitant financial crisis of the state, its parties and principal Italian industries which undermined the major actors' ability to uphold their clientelistic systems.  Such a thesis presupposes a methodological shift away from simple ‘outside-in’ explanations. It focuses instead on the interaction between different transnational and/or societal self-sustaining networks whose borders need not necessarily coincide with state borders. In the present context of rampant globalization, the inner development and linkage between the party system, the welfare state, organized crime and the Italian version of capitalism are analysed as the main articulations of the overt/covert order upon which the Italian postwar social contract rested. As long as the basic problems of this con- tract remain unsolved, as for instance the insufficient distinction between the political and economic sphere or the systematic application of double standards, it seems premature to talk about a Second Italian Republic.

International Relations theory is being squeezed between two sides. On the one hand, the world of practitioners and attached experts often perceive International Relations theory as misleading if it does not correspond to practical knowledge, and redundant when it does. The academic study of international relations can and should not be anything beyond the capacity to provide political judgement which comes through reflection on the historical experience of practitioners. On the other hand, and within its disciplinary confines, International Relations theory is reduced to a particular type of
empirical theory with increasing resistance to further self-reflection. Instead, this article argues that neither reduction is viable. Reducing theory to practical knowledge runs
into self-contradictions; reducing theorizing to its empirical mode underestimates the constitutive function of theories, the role of concepts, and hence the variety of necessary modes of theorizing. I present this twofold claim in steps of increasing reflexivity in International Relations theory and propose four modes of theorizing: normative, metatheoretical, ontological/constitutive and empirical.

he article seeks to offer a way forward in discussions about the status of securitization theory. In my reading, this debate has been inhibited by the difficulty of finding an appropriate version of ‘understanding/explanation’ that would be consistent with the meta-theoretical commitments of a post-structuralist theory.
By leaving ‘explanation’ and/or all versions of causality to the positivist other, the Copenhagen School also left its own explanatory status often implicit, or only negatively defined. Instead, the present article claims that the explanatory theory used in securitization research de facto relies on causal mechanisms that are nonpositivistically conceived. Using the appropriate methodological literature renders this explanatory
status explicit, exposing the theory’s non-positivist causality and thus, hopefully, enhancing its empirical theory.

In order to avoid both theoretically eclectic and redundant approaches to constructivism, this article proposes one possible and coherent reconstruction of constructivism understood as a reflexive meta-theory. This reconstruction starts by taking seriously the double sociological and interpretivist turn of the social sciences. Based on ‘double
hermeneutics’, constructivism is perhaps best understood by distinguishing its position on the level of observation, the level of action proper, and the relationship between these two levels. On the basis of this distinction, the article argues
that constructivism is epistemologically about the social construction of knowledge and ontologically about
the construction of social reality. It furthermore asks us to
combine a social theory of knowledge with an intersubjective, not an individualist, theory of action. Finally, the analysis of power is central to understanding the reflexive link between the two levels of observation and action. The argument is embedded in a contextualization where constructivism
is seen as inspired by ‘reflexive modernity’, as well as more
directly by the end of the Cold War.

The present article argues that the discipline of international relations is bound to repeat its rounds of debates about realism as long as the underlying dynamic intrinsic to the realist tradition is not understood. Whereas present debates tend to criticize contemporary realists for going astray (an unhappy conjuncture, as it were), this article claims that
there exists a systematic theoretical problem with the way realist theorizing has developed within international relations,
and consisting of two fundamental dilemmas. The first or ‘identity dilemma’, the choice between distinctiveness and determinacy, results from the characteristics of the central concept ‘power’ — realists either keep a distinct and single
micro–macro link through concepts of power/influence which provides indeterminate explanations or they improve their explanations, but must do so by relaxing their assumptions, thereby losing distinctiveness. The second or ‘conservative
dilemma’, the choice between tradition and justification,
results from the fact that realism is a form of practical
knowledge, which needs some form of justification other than the recourse to mere tradition. Hence, realists either update the practical knowledge of a shared diplomatic culture while losing scientific credibility or, reaching for logical persuasiveness, cast their maxims in a scientific mould which distorts the realist tradition. Realism in international relations
is fated to return to these dilemmas until it abandons its
own identity as derived from the ‘first debate’ between realism
and idealism. By doing so, however, it would be free to join a series of metatheoretical and theoretical research avenues which it has so far left to other schools of thought.

Como forma de evitar tanto abordagens teoricamente ecléticas, quanto abordagens teoricamente redundantes, este artigo propõe uma reconstrução possível e coerente do construtivismo, entendido como uma metateoria reflexiva. Esta reconstrução começa levando a sério a dupla virada sociológica e interpretivista nas ciências sociais. Baseado na “dupla hermenêutica”, o construtivismo pode ser mais bem compreendido distinguindose sua postura quanto ao nível da observação, quanto ao nível da ação
propriamente dita e quanto à relação entre esses dois níveis. Com base nessa distinção, o artigo argumenta que o construtivismo trata, do ponto de vista epistemológico, sobre a construção social do conhecimento e, do ponto de vista ontológico, sobre a construção da realidade social. Além disso, o construtivismo demanda a combinação de uma teoria social do conhecimento com uma teoria
intersubjetivista da ação, em detrimento de uma teoria individualista da ação. Finalmente, a análise do poder é central para compreender a ligação reflexiva que se estabelece entre os níveis da observação e da ação. Este argumento está inserido numa contextualização na qual o construtivismo é inspirado pela “modernidade reflexiva” e, mais diretamente, pelo fim da Guerra Fria.

The Working Paper provides a dual historisation of ‘securitisation’, i.e. of the origins of the Copenhagen School in terms of its direct world historical context and of the historical origins of the specific bias in our political discourse which is prompted by security discourses. Born almost as a rationalisation of German Ostpolitik, and hence with desecuritisation, the Copenhagen School understood the speech act less as a kind of conspiratorial or elite manipulation than as the manifold processes that give prominence to the discourse of security (the reversal of Clausewitz) in public debate or diminish it, as in the processes of desecuritisation. This means that I see ‘securitisation’ not in the ‘act’ of those ‘speaking’ security, but in the possibly unintended and unconscious de-/mobilisation of the inherent logic, or grammar, of the discourse of security.
This begs the question, however, of where the discourse of security would have gained its inherent logic from. It is here where a second necessary historicisation has to take place, not about the context of the theory itself, but about the content of its central concept. The Copenhagen School has been criticised for being basically still too conventional or realist in its reading of security, being connected to exceptional measures, done by foreign-policy elites, etc. But just as the increasing number of security sectors indicates, this is not to be understood as the ‘essence’ of security, but rather as the effect of a historical development in which certain actors have traditionally come to be authorised to talk and effect war and peace in a ‘realist’ way. This implies that, by reifying a historical moment into a general framework of analysis, securitisation theory may indeed help to reproduce such an understanding, although it does not need to.  In return, it implies, however, that if a different understanding of security (beyond the raison d’État) appears and becomes shared, the Copenhagen School will also have to adapt. Its conceptualisation is historically bound.

The article takes a stance in the Weber reception which tries to see him mainly as a forerunner of an empirical social science and a causal conception of power as in the Dahlian tradition. It will argue and confirm Raymond Aron’s take that, to the contrary, his social science is profoundly imbued by philosophical aims: ‘This interpretation of the relation between science and politics leads to a certain philosophy which at the time was not yet called “existential[ist]”, but which belongs to this current so named today.’ Hence, rather than only seeing his sociology as a way to demarcate the specificity of the social investigation from both normative theory and the natural sciences – which it certainly did – the following article follows those who see his methodological and sociological decisions as part of a political and ethical endeavour.

The Bush administration’s foreign policy hitherto suffers from a neglect of diplomacy. It has emphasised a strategy that combines unilateral and re-militarising elements. Security is conceived of in terms of a gated community writ large. Diplomacy is downgraded to alliance-building (conveniently misnamed multilateralism) for a policy already decided. Other countries are sheer objects, not subjects, within US foreign
policy. The conception of order in international society is stripped of substantial components of justice or legitimacy, to which the US would accept being subjected itself. In short, there is a tendency to repeat the US cold war strategy which reversed Clausewitz, that is, where politics becomes the prolongation of war with other means. The article consciously bases its critique mainly on realist writers, simply to show that
the present US foreign policy is debatable even in realist terms.