Theories des relations internationales

Nehal Bhuta (EUI), Predicting disorder: « Early Warning » and Indexes of State Failure

The term “failed state” appears to have emerged in the early 1990s, and was used in reference to dramatic cases of state collapse, generally occasioned by severe internal conflict. After September 11, the security threats associated with state failure triggered an interest in understanding the correlates and preconditions for such situations. Attempts to develop measures of failure and fragility proliferated, and were sought out as « early warning » mechanisms which would allow governments to have some foreknowledge of risks of conflict and instability and so develop policy interventions. The ambition of these measures was to foresee crises of political order before they materialized and thus help forestall them, and to provide diagnostic tools to better address the « causes of instability. » This paper will examine the rise of interest in « early warning » mechanisms for state fragility, and one specific effort to quantify « state fragility » by the United States Agency for International Development.

Governance by Indicators’ book
Discussant: Didier Bigo (Sciences Po – King’s College)
Salle Jean Monnet : 17.00-19.00

Christian Reus-Smit (EUI)

Struggles for individual rights played a key role in the globalization of the present system of sovereign states. From its original kernel in sixteenth century Europe, the system expanded through five great waves; the most significant were those associated with the Westphalian settlement, the independence of the Americas, and post-1945 decolonization. In each case , empires suffered crises of legitimacy as new ideas about rights were mobilized to challenge established regimes of entitlements. When empires proved incapable of accommodating the new rights claims, subject peoples embraced the sovereign state as the institutional alternative. This history challenges not only conventional understandings of the relation between individual rights and sovereignty, but also opens up new possibilities for the normative justification of human rights. This seminar sets out the historical and theoretical argument in greater detail, and sketches, in a very preliminary fashion, its implications for normative theory. Overall, it offers an example of how empirical and normative enquiry can be brought into productive dialogue.

Sciences Po, Salle du Conseil, 13, rue de l’Université, 17.00-19.00

Discussant: Richard Beardsworth (AUP)

Pierre Hazan (Sciences Po)

De l’ex-Yougoslavie au Soudan, du Proche-Orient au Cambodge, la question de l’intervention de la justice internationale se pose désormais à chaque conflit, suscitant immanquablement de virulentes controverses. Deux thèses s’affrontent: les uns ne voient dans cette justice qu’une arme utilisée ou délaissée par les gouvernements selon leurs intérêts du moment; d’autres considèrent au contraire la lutte contre l’impunité comme le socle d’un Etat de droit et d’une société démocratique.
La justice est-elle un obstacle ou une condition à la paix? Est-elle indispensable pour reconstruire des sociétés et rétablir une paix durable? A travers des cas concrets (ex-Yougoslavie, Libéria, Soudan, Liban…), Pierre Hazan analyse les effets de cette nouvelle diplomatie judiciaire.

Président de séance : Pierre Hassner (CERI Sciences Po)
Discutant: Guillaume Devin (Sciences Po)
CERI 17.00 – 19.00

The Nuclear Alternative and its Effects.
What It Takes to Read Nuclear History as an Alternative between Proliferation and Extended Deterrence

Benoît Pelopidas (James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies)

Within IR theory, the literature on deterrence, the one dealing with proliferation and finally the one dealing with disarmament are intuitively connected but this link is rarely stated clearly or explicitly. I posit here that “extended nuclear deterrence” is an interesting starting point to examine this nexus. Extended nuclear deterrence plays an important role in the narrative of the Cold War as nuclear peace. This paper will argue it is also a cornerstone of the narrative of nuclear history as proliferation history through what I label the “nuclear alternative” and will assess this alternative. The nuclear alternative can be stated as follows: either a protector provides a nuclear security guarantee to its ally/ies or it/they will get his/their own nuclear weapons. First, the paper will provide an assessment of extended deterrence as a non-proliferation tool based on comparative case studies, showing that it has neither been a necessary nor a sufficient condition for nonproliferation, which invalidates the notion of nuclear alternative. Second, using sociology of knowledge, it will analyze the “good reasons” (Boudon) to believe in such an alternative and debunks their implicit and faulty assumptions. The credibility problem emphasized in the literature on deterrence will therefore not appear as the only reason why the alternative is not valid. Third, the paper will expose the contemporary effects of such a view of history on the possibility of downsizing the US nuclear arsenal and on what is considered as proliferation.

CERI 5 – 7pm

Discussant: Richard Beardsworth

Jack Snyder (Columbia University)

Since September 11, 2001, religion has become a central topic in discussions about international politics. And yet the standard works of US international relations theory, which continue to shape much academic research, hardly mention religion. A handful of new works by young US international relations scholars have begun to fill this gap. The best of this new work is represented in Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in March 2011. Snyder’s overview of the project will focus on four approaches to integrating religion into theoretically-grounded international relations scholarship: (1) working within the traditional US paradigms of realism, liberalism, and social constructivism, (2) supplanting existing paradigms with a religion-centered theory, such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis, (3) analyzing secularisms as worldviews comparable to religions, and (4) treating religion as a variable in testable hypotheses about the causes of conflict international relations.

Discussant: Denis Lacorne (CERI)
CERI – Salle de conférences 5pm – 7pm

Erez Manela (Harvard University)

Scholars of international relations and law have been writing about international society for a while now, but historians, particularly in the United States, have been slow to adopt this term or wrestle with its implications. Though the field of international history has been experiencing a revival in the United States, with new work taking the field in exciting new directions, innovation has been coupled with disagreement and confusion about the changing shape of the field and its spatial, temporal, thematic, and methodological scope. This paper summarizes the debate about the state and direction of the field over the last several decades, outlines the state of the field today, and then attempts to show how reconceiving the field as the history of international society could help bring the numerous threads of recent developments into a coherent and common framework.

Discussants:
Karoline Postel-Vinay (CERI Sciences Po), Paul-André Rosental (Sciences Po-Centre d’Histoire)

Co-organized with Sciences Po Centre d’Histoire

CERI, salle du conseil 10.30 am – 12.30 pm

Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University)

‘The normative and political dimensions of causal analysis’

Often the idea of causal analysis is separated from the analysis of normative issues and questions of moral and political responsibility, in IR and also in many circles in philosophy of social sciences. This tendency is generated by an unthinking acceptance and reproduction of a positivist fact-value distinction. When causal analysis is framed in non-positivist terms we can see not only that there is nothing a-normative or a-political about the analysis of causation, but also that complex issues arise concerning the exact relationship between the frameworks of causal analysis we use and our normative and political commitments. I will argue here that engaging in causal analysis is a deeply moral, normatively-loaded, and political matter, and moreover, that important issues are at stake in the kind of meta-theoretical frameworks we apply to causal analysis. Far from dismissing causal analysis as de-politicising, as has been the tendency in the interpretivist end of IR, we should recognise that it is around debates about causality, and frameworks of causal analysis, that much of the interesting moral and political debate in international relations takes place.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/interpol/en/research/MK%20project/Index.htm
CERI, 5-7 pm (salle de conférences rez-de-chaussée)

Richard Price (University of British Columbia)

Moral Limit and Possibility in IR

At what point, if any, is one to reasonably concede that the ‘realities’ of world politics require compromise from cherished principles or moral ends, and how do we really know we have reached an ethical limit when we seen one? Since social constructivist analyses of the development of moral norms tell us how we get moral change in world politics, that agenda should provide insightful leverage on the ethical question of ‘what to do.’ This talk identifies contributions of the social constructivist research agenda in International Relations for theorizing moral limit and possibility in global political dilemmas, engaging in particular international political theory and critical IR theory, and questions of the relationship of normative and empirical scholarship in IR.

CERI 10 am -12 pm