Intro to IR Roundup: Nukes, Migration, Syria and IR Research

Today is the first day of fall 2016-17 classes. I usually teach Intro to International Relations in the fall, but am out of my routine due to a conference I'm organizing. However, I thought I'd post several good sound bytes which I would have offered to students had I been kicking off class with a dose of current events and international crises.

Syria: Why is the war so damn long and bloody. It's gets more violent by the day. Drawing on IR

 AFP/Getty Images

research, Max Fisher of the New York Times provides a run-down of some of the factors contributing to the ugly nature of the Syrian war. The usual suspects like multiparty factions and ethnic/sectarian divisions. But a big culprit appears to be foreign sponsorship/intervention. As Fisher writes:

"Foreign interventions that were intended to end the war ...have instead entrenched it in a stalemate in which violence is self-reinforcing and the normal avenues for peace are all closed...Whenever one side loses ground, its foreign backers increase their involvement, sending supplies or air support to prevent their favored player’s defeat. Then that side begins winning, which tends to prompt the other’s foreign backers to up their ante as well. Each escalation is a bit stronger than what came before, accelerating the killing without ever changing the war’s fundamental balance."

Intervention: Recent interventions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) have left us pondering the costs of such intervention.  Anne Applebaum asks what the costs of non-intervention have been in Syria in terms of total deaths, the refugee crisis, the destabilization of the region, and security threats in Europe . Of course, intervention could have made all of this even worse. Fareed Zakaria earlier argued that it was probably best for the U.S. not to intervene, but it could/should have done much more on humanitarian assistance, even if it rightfully chooses not to pursue humanitarian intervention. Part of the problem may be the politicization of aid.

Nuclear Weapons: Obama is toying with the idea of changing U.S. strategic doctrine by declaring a no first use nuclear weapons policy. Some pros and cons of a first no use policy are outlined by the WSJ.  While reducing nukes sounds good in theory, Stephen Sestanovich of CFR pushes back against this change.

Migration: Want to know the difference between migrants and refugees. A CFR video and backgrounder explains here.

Russia, Turkey, and IR Paradigms

In a nod to ideological alliances, Anne Applebaum argues that dictators will choose other dictators at the end of the day and cites Turkish President Recep Erodgan's recent meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin as an example. Despite Turkey's membership in NATO, Edrogan has used the military coup to crackdown on even the slightest potential for opposition.  As Applebaum writes:

(Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)

Geostrategic, military and even historical calculations should make Turkey and Russia antagonists. But their meeting illustrates something that many Western politicians and “realist” thinkers find difficult to understand: that ideas and ideology sooner or later trump “interests.” If Turkey were still a democracy, Erdogan would be looking to his Western allies to help him push back against Russia. But contact with the West also means contact with Western ideas. Dependence on the West means dependence on states that believe in the legal norms which Erdogan wants to repress, states that might support the people Erdogan wants to lock up.

Victory for constructivists? Does this really mean ideas trump interests? Well, Turkey's move does indicate the power of ideas. But ideas too reflect particular interests. What's important here (for IR students) is the relationship between ideas and interests and whether in the case of Turkey and Russia, ideas are defining actors' interests.

Historical Institutionalism and International Relations

I’m swinging as far as possible from social  movements in this post, but I just re-read Dan Nexon’s article responding to Orfeo Fiortes' IO review essay on historical institutionalism (HI) in international relations (IR). Fiortes and Nexon adopt two different approaches.

 Fiortes: Microfoundations and preference formation. The sunk costs, increasing returns, and framing effects generated by institutions shape actors’ preferences.

Nexon: Dynamic processes embedded in context. Nexon sees much more variation in institutional processes. HI “develops a toolkit for grappling with the dynamic nature of causal processes and their embeddednness within specific socio-historical contexts.”  Nexon emphasizes the “contingent nature of change processes.”

Both approaches highlight the importance of sequencing, timing, and path dependency. But Fiortes’ treatment of these mechanisms don’t differ that greatly from rational institutionalism. Preferences still dictate choices leading to outcomes. Nexon, alternatively moves from microfoundations to middle-range-theory where he believes HI provides the most promise and points to the “variable nature of change processes” [emphasis mine]. Network structures of institutions, relational mechanisms, practice and habitus, norm diffusion are also processes which may take on characteristics of HI. Nexon finds the emphasis on a “specific decision-theoretic framework to institutional choice” problematic because it limits what HI has to offer about change and transformation in IR. What we wind up with are “static models offering invariant explanations across time and space.” 

My own research on the evolution of East Asia’s regional architecture closely resembles the Fiortes version of HI, but my understanding of the social world is much more in line with Nexon (note to self: revisit APSA paper through Nexon’s framework).  There are affinities between constructivism, HI, and the connection between institutions, ideas and policy preferences which may link the Fiortes with the Nexon view.

One possible critique of Nexon’s approach though is that it dilutes the theoretical precision of HI. It becomes unclear exactly what HI is or does if we take the middle-range theory approach. I suspect Nexon sees HI as a tent which encompasses a wide variety or mechanisms and processes but some may still appreciate the narrower view of HI.