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Political shocks have come to be considered highly salient for
explaining major changes to international politics and to the
foreign policies of states. Such shocks can occur at all levels of
analysis: domestically, dyadically, regionally, or globally. They
range from political phenomena such as coups and wars to ecological
catastrophes. These shocks are sufficiently disruptive to cause
foreign policy makers to reconsider their foreign policy
orientations and to contemplate major changes to their policies. In
fact, some have argued that it is mostly through political shocks
that fundamental policy change occurs in most states. No wonder
then that political shocks are now increasingly part of the toolbox
of considerations used by foreign policy and international
relations scholars as they focus on understanding patterns of
conflict and cooperation between states. Given the salience
of political shocks to understand foreign policy change, this book
brings together a group of both senior and more junior scholars
whose previous work has shown substantial promise for moving
forward theory and empirical analysis. Their combined efforts in
this book highlight the value of multiple theoretical and empirical
approaches to a clearer understanding of the nature of political
shocks and their consequences for foreign policy and international
politics.
This edited book complements and follows up on the book, Thompson
and Volgy et al, Regions, Power and Conflict: Constrained
Capabilities, Hierarchy, and Rivalry. It is predicated in
part on the paucity of published material available on comparing
regional international politics. Monadic, dyadic, and systemic
approaches all have their uses and have been exploited extensively.
The same cannot be said about comparative regional analysis.
The premise is that a great deal of international politics takes
place within regional parameters. Most states simply lack
the capability or interest in devoting many resources to
extra-regional affairs. Yet each region is distinctive. In
some, military coups remain common while they have died out as a
form of political practice in others. A few have been highly
conflictual and then become more pacific, while others persist in
their conflict intensity. Some have powerful neighbors with
intervention tendencies, while others are surrounded by relatively
weak states. Some are rich; others are poor. The point is that
regions, all with proper names, have attributes that can be
harnessed through comparison to explain why regional behavior
differs greatly across the planet. The aim is to replace the proper
names with the leading variables that appear to drive behavior. For
instance, to shrug and say “that’s the Middle East for you”
does not take us very far. Replacing the Middle East label
with conceptualization about how a set of small, weak, autocratic
states behave subject to high penetration by major powers might
take us farther than shrugging off regional identity.
We have good reasons to think that comparative
regional analysis can deliver an explanatory value-added product
just as much as alternative “levels of analysis” can.
Ultimately, we might desire to integrate separate levels of
analysis, rather than segregating them. But in the short
term, we need to encourage comparative regional analysis because it
is the least developed perspective. Why that might be the
case can be debated, but it stems in part from our disciplinary
tendencies for some analysts to specialize in regional behavior
largely in a descriptive vein while others prefer to focus on
explaining universal behavior. Comparative regional behavior
tends to be squeezed out by regional scholars who suspect
generalization about behavior and universal scholars who suspect
particular contexts such as regions. Comparative regional
analysis requires analysts who are willing to explore
generalization but acknowledge regional contexts more explicitly
than is customary. At the same time, more general
substitutes for those regional labels must be introduced if
explanatory headway is to be achieved.
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Regions, Power, and Conflict - Constrained Capabilities, Hierarchy, and Rivalry (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2022)
William R. Thompson, Thomas J. Volgy, Paul Bezerra, Jacob Cramer, Kelly Marie Gordell, …
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R3,719
Discovery Miles 37 190
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The three main levels of analysis in international relations have
been the systemic, the national, and the individual. A fourth level
that falls between the systemic and the national is the region. It
is woefully underdeveloped in comparison to the attention afforded
the other three. Yet regions tend to be distinctive theaters for
international politics. Otherwise, we would not recognize that
Middle Eastern interstate politics somehow does not resemble Latin
American interstate politics or interstate politics in Southern
Africa (although once the Middle East and Southern Africa may have
seemed more similar in their mutual fixation with opposition to
domestic policies in Israel and South Africa, respectively). This
book, divided into three parts, first makes a case for studying
regional politics even though it must also be appreciated that
regional boundaries are also hazy and not always easy to pin down
empirically. The second part examines power distributions within
regions as an important entry point to studying regional
similarities and differences. Two emphases are stressed. One is
that regional power assessments need to be conditioned by
controlling for weak states which are more common in some regions
than they are in others. The other emphasis is on regional power
hierarchies. Some regions have strong regional hierarchies while
others do not. Regions with strong hierarchies operate much
differently from those without them in the sense that the former
are more pacific than the latter. The third part of the book
focuses on regional differences in terms of conflict behavior,
order preferences, rivalries, and rivalry termination.
Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million
Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and
poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The
Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in
the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten
Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among
responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous
1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families
equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely
confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults.
It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society
to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times.
The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and
expectations of these industrious people through broad-based
factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families.
Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the
country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate
welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many
American school children are closely connected to the existence of
working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is
taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society
arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have
discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The
problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the
media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the
implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose
effective solutions that require simple changes to existing
policies solutions that are politically feasible and can be
accomplished without new taxes."
Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million
Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and
poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The
Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in
the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten
Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among
responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous
1980s, the number of Americans living in working-poor families
equaled the combined populations of the nation's 25 largest cities.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, this situation is not largely
confined to minorities, women, the undereducated or young adults.
It is commonplace for workers from nearly all segments of society
to be employed in low-paying jobs even during good economic times.
The Forgotten Americans reveals the betrayal of the hopes and
expectations of these industrious people through broad-based
factual evidence and the real-life stories of individual families.
Their hardship has been ignored at enormous cost to them and the
country. Numerous problems at the forefront of national debate
welfare dependency, crime, and the inadequate performance of many
American school children are closely connected to the existence of
working poverty on a large scale. Unless corrective action is
taken, the country risks the creation of a deeply fractured society
arising from the despair of millions of employed people who have
discovered that practicing the work ethic yields little reward. The
problem is staggering and often misunderstood by politicians, the
media, and the public. Once Schwarz and Volgy have outlined the
implications of this social and economic tragedy, they propose
effective solutions that require simple changes to existing
policies solutions that are politically feasible and can be
accomplished without new taxes."
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