Kenneth Waltz is an authority of scholarship in international relations. He is best known for his 1979 book Theories of International, where he proposes a theory entitled structural realism. However, what people would find more interesting his idea that nuclear powers do not engage into war with each other. For the sake of background information, a couple…
Originally posted on The International Scope:
I guess the bottom line is that realists may not be angels, but in the real world, angels often turn out to be brutes. Because if you’re moralizing, crusading, saying we don’t like your human rights policies and we don’t like your regime the way — it’s not democratic…
Recently I have been studying foreign policy decision making – which is the process of the actually coming to decision making – more thoroughly, and I feel that analyses of contemporary political international affairs still focus overly on the state as a unitary actor. The relevance of the decision processes that are at hand in…
There are six main theories of foreign policy decision making (FPDM) 1. Rational actor model: The decision making process rests exclusively on a cost-benefit analysis where the decision maker is expected to make the best decision, having analysed all the possible alternatives. The expected utility theory approach plays an important role in rational choice theory…
A summary of Derya Göçer Akder’s article Theories of Revolutions and Arab Uprisings. Derya Göçer Akder, Theories of Revolutions and Arab Uprisings: The Lessons from the Middle East, Ortadoğu Etütleri, Volume 4, No 2, January 2013, pp.85-110. Introduction The article persuades us to rethink some of the ideas that are generally assumed about revolutions – lessons that…
I have been reading a couple of articles from Evgeny Morozov, and I listened to him on Al Jazeera’s Listening Post and (Dutch) VPRO’s Tegenlicht. And he strikes me as interesting due to his very critical standing on the notion that the Internet can solve all our problems. More interestingly, he also is sceptical of the role…
On the basis of the previous analysis of Iran’s and Syria’s individual foreign policy principles/behaviors and the development of the Syrian-Iranian relations, has the Syrian-Iranian alliance made sense in the past and does it make sense in the context of the 2011 Syrian uprising? Preventing isolation There are good reasons to argue in favour of…
