Soft power—the ability to achieve desired outcomes through attraction rather than coercion—has become an important part of scholarly thinking and policy practice with respect to world politics. And yet attraction, the core component of soft power, has been largely neglected in scholarly research. Research has been undertaken, policy suggestions offered, and ethical conclusions about soft power drawn all on the basis of implicit and often unacknowledged assumptions about attraction. As I argue here, this is problematic because neither of the most prominent assumptions— attraction as natural and attraction as constructed through persuasive argument—are feasible or logical in the context of world politics. In fact, as I argue, in the context of world politics it makes far more sense to model attraction as a relationship that is constructed through representational force—a nonphysical but nevertheless coercive form of power that is exercised through language. Insofar as attraction is sociolinguistically constructed through representational force, soft power should be not be understood in juxtaposition to hard power but as a continuation of it by different means. This analytic insight in turn demands some practical and normative reformulations about soft power. ————————————————————————
Hierarchy-centered approaches to IR promise to deliver what anarchy-centered approaches have not: a framework for theorizing and empirically analyzing world politics as a global system rather than just an international one. At the core of this proposition are three features of hierarchical systems as they are represented across the growing IR literature on the topic. First, the structures of differentiation at the core of hierarchical systems are deeply implicated with power. Hierarchical systems are thus intrinsically political. Second, in world politics, hierarchies stratify, rank, and organize the relations not only among states but also other kinds of actors as well, and often even a mix of different actors within a single structure of differentiation. Third, there are many different kinds of hierarchical relations in world politics, each of which generate different “logics” influencing social, moral, and behavioral outcomes. Hierarchy has been understood in the IR literature in two ways: narrowly, as a relationship of legitimate authority; and broadly, as intersubjective manifestations of organized inequality. Hierarchy operates in a variety of different ways that range from ordering solutions to deep structures. We identify three such “logics” that have been fruitfully explored in IR scholarship and that can form the basis of a future research agenda: hierarchy as an institutionalized functional bargain between actors (a logic of trade-offs); hierarchy as differentiated social and political roles shaping behavior (a logic of positionality); and hierarchy as a productive political space or structure (a logic of productivity).
International Relations scholars often treat international order as a byproduct of threats of military violence. Recent scholarship, however, has focused attention on security communities — nonviolent international orders that develop as a by-product of interstate collective identity. Yet it is unclear how these regimes could work during crises when collective identity is disrupted. This article argues that during such periods member states can use representational force, a form of power exercised through language, to stabilize their collective identity. Through an analysis of the Anglo-American security community during the 1956 Suez Crisis I demonstrate how both states relied on nonphysical but forceful expressions of power to `fasten' their identity against the disintegrating effects of their dispute. One effect was to stabilize the security community and preserve nonviolent order. While this illuminates one process by which security communities can weather crises, it also highlights that getting beyond guns does not necessarily mean getting beyond force.
There is growing appreciation among International Relations (IR) scholars that emotion matters fundamentally to the dynamics of world politics. But discerning and establishing just how has proven rather difficult. At the heart of the problem is that the phenomenon of emotion does not "fit"" conveniently into any of the usual orienting categories used in JR. Emotions are the embodied experiences of concrete persons but they are not actually the "properties"" of those persons. Rather than things people have, emotions are contingent waysof-being human-that is, experiences of human beingthat emerge from interactions between agencies and structures of both material and social sorts. They are neither substance nor process, neither natural nor cultural, neither cognitive nor physiological. In the context of IR, this means that it makes little sense to try to apprehend emotions through the levels-of-analysis framework that organizes the field. For those interested in understanding the role of emotion in world politics, the daunting questions begin with how one begins. I found myself facing these questions during the course of an ongoing research project when I came to suspect that emotion was a key force in producing the outcome that interested me. Since this was not what I had expected, pursuing my suspicion meant taldng a considerable detour to figure out how other scholars had managed to study emotion. What I found, both in and outside ofiR, is that most scholars have met the challenge by dodging it. In IR, in particular, the existing literature on emotion succeeds in examining its role in world politics only to the extent that it wittingly or unwittingly assumes away the ontological complexity of emotion. It was in this context-that is, in search of a way to conceptualize, theorize, and perform empirical research on emotion in world politics-that I stumbled into practice theory. In this chapter, I argue that practice theory offers a framework that embraces, rather than assumes away, the ontological complexity of emotion. It offers a way to fathom emotion that does not reduce that phenomenon to one or the other of the categories it exceeds. Because of this, practice theory lays the * The author is grateful for written feedback on earlier versions of this chapter from Emanuel
As technology has advanced, scholarly communication has evolved, creating new opportunities for academic libraries to serve researchers. This article examines the current state and potential future of academic library-based publishing. The review of the literature explores the scholarly communication ecosystem as it pertains to new publishing paradigms supported by academic libraries, including the complexity of nontraditional publishing models. These models and their implications, as well as how they may be implemented, are then explored in the academic library environment. Next, survey data from nineteen academic librarians collected at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in January 2015 is presented. Based on the literature and the survey data, this article argues that the principle concerns for academic library-based publishing going forward include 1) the need for the dedicated and/or sustained financial models for library-based publishing initiatives and 2) the cultural and financial capital to support librarians as they further expand their knowledge and expertise to support additional publishing-related functionalities in support of these new models. Both of these concerns ultimately tie to the persistent question of perceived quality, and by extension, reputation, of library-based publishing and open access publishing more broadly.
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