Why do ethnic conflicts arise? This question has been a persistent one in the field of political science, and has generated various theories and approaches attempting to explain conflict proliferation from different angles. Consulting current political science literature and Prof James Fearon, an expert on ethnic conflicts, we identify two main approaches to understanding the problem: one has e...

The concept of alliance or preferably ‘alignment’, as I shall explain below – is central to the conduct of international politics, and thus the discipline of International Relations (IR). Duffield et al. (2008: 291) identify that ‘Alliances are one of the most significant phenomena in security studies and world politics more generally’, while Modelski (1963: 773) considers them ‘one of a dozen ...

In this article I locate some of the fundamental problems of self-determination within the context of an evolving international society. First, I argue that one particular manifestation of self-determination, that of national self-determination, is both a solution to the enduring problem of territorial legitimation in international relations as well as the source of subsequent challenges to ter...

The aim of this paper is to gain an empirical insight into the structures of economic power in Hungary at the end of the nineties. The paper proceeds by the guidance of the weberian definition of power; as power is existing in relations, the paper is intended to be a relational study of the most important actors in the Hungarian economy, using directorate interlocks to trace these relations. Th...

Historically, issues of gender, race and the environment have received little attention in mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship. Great strides have been made, however, in interrogating the inadequacies of the field in these areas and, similarly, in demonstrating the necessity of expanded definitions of security and violence in IR. Despite these strides, mainstream environmental s...

The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic of vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates and empowers marginalized peoples, critics assert that it enacts new forms of control and regulation. This paper reads these debates through the analytical lens offered by assemblage thinking. Assemblage allows us to foreground affectiv...

The state plays a central position in theoretical debates in International Relations (IR). Both Realists and Liberals see the state as the central actor in the international system and thereby follow a Western understanding of the state as the holder of the monopoly of force. In the IRsub discipline of security studies new categories such as weak state, quasi state or state failure have created...

The authors used an event-contingent daily recording strategy, the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR), to examine the motivational dynamics of interpersonal relations. Using hierarchical linear modeling, the authors demonstrated that social interactions were more pleasant when participants felt autonomous, competent, and related. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness consistently predicted inte...

Recent rhetoric surrounding the contemporary aid relationship between donors and African states is couched in terms of a high level consensus between western and African political leaderships, a central pillar of which is adherence to liberal principles of governance and economic management. The paper argues that an analysis of the nature of this consensus and its prospects requires that we nee...