Test #1 Flashcards
The relationship among the world’s state governments and the connections of those relationships with other actors, with other social relationships, and with geographical and historical influences.
International Relations
The problem of sharing interests versus conflicting interests among the members of a group.
Collective Action / Free Riding / Burden Sharing / The Tragedy of the Commons / Prisoner’s Dilemma
The problem of how to provide something that benefits all members of a group regardless of what each member contributes to it.
Collective Goods Problem
A principle for solving collective goods problems by imposing solutions hierarchically.
Dominance
A principle for solving the collective goods problem by rewarding behaviour that contributes to the group and punishing behaviour that pursues self interest at the expense of the group.
Reciprocity
A principle for solving collective goods problems by changing participants preferences based on their shared sense of belongings to a community.
Identity
Distinct spheres of international activity ( such as global negotiations ) within which policy makers of various states face conflicts and sometimes achieve cooperation.
Issue Areas
The types of actions that states take towards each other though time.
Conflict and Cooperation
A subfiles of international relations that focuses on questions of war and peace.
International Security
The study of the politics of trade, monetary, and other economic relations among nations, and their connection to other transnational forces.
International Political Economy
A territorial entity controlled by a government and inhabited by a population.
State
Head of government.
State Leader
The set of relationships among the world’s states, structured by certain rules and patterns of interactions.
International System
Most large nations; Nations whose populations share a sense of national identity, usually including a language and culture.
Nation States
The size of a state’s total annual economic activity.
GDP ( Gross Domestic Product )
Actors other than state governments that operate either below the level of the state or across state borders.
Non-Stae Actors
Organization whose members are state governments.
Intergovernmental Organizations ( IGO’s )
Private organizations that interact with states, multinational co-operations, other NGO’s and intergovernmental organizations.
Non-Governmental Organization (NGO’s)
Companies that span multiple countries.
Multinational Corporations
A perspective on IR based on a set of similar actors or processes that suggest possible explanations to “why” questions.
Levels of Analysis
Concerns the perceptions, choice, and actions of individual human beings.
Individual Level
Concerns the aggregations of individuals within states that influence state actions in the international arena.
Domestic Level
Concerns the influence of the intentional system upon outcomes.
Interstate/ International / Systemic Level
Seeks to explain international outcomes in terms of global trends and forces that transcend the interactions of states themselves.
Global Level
The increasing integrations of the world in terms of communications, culture, and economics; May also refer to changing subjective experiences of space and time accompanying this process.
Globalization
The disparity in resources between the industrialized relatively rich countries of the West and the poorer countries of Africa, the Middle East and much of Asia and Latin America.
North-South Gap
An organisation established after WWI and a forerunner of today’s United Nations; It achieved certain humanitarian and other successful successes but was weakened by the absence of US membership and by its own lack of effectiveness in ensuring collective security.
League of Nations
A symbol of the failed policy of appeasement, this agreement, signed in 1938, allowed Nazi Germany to occupy a part of Czechoslovakia. Rather than appease German aspirations, it was followed by further German expansions; which triggered WWII.
Munich Agreement
The hostile relations -punctuated by occasional periods of improvement, or détente - between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, from 1945 to 1990.
Cold War
A policy adopted in the late 1940’s by which the United States sought to halt the global expansion of Soviet influence on several levels - military, political, ideological and economic.
Containment
A rift in the 1960’s between the communists powers of the Soviet Union and China, fuelled by China’s opposition to Soviet moves towards peaceful co-existence with the United Staes.
Sino-Soviet Split
A meeting between heads of states, often referring to leaders or great powers, as in the Cold War superpower summits between the United States and the Soviet Union, or today’s meetings of the group of twenty on economic coordination.
Summit Meeting
A superpower crisis, sparked by the Soviet Union’s installation of medium ranged nuclear missiles in Cuba, that marks the moment when the United Staes and the Soviet Union came closest to nuclear war.
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Wars in the third world - often civil wars - in which the United Staes and the Soviet Union jockeyed for position by supplying and advising opposing factions.
Proxywars
Neither side can prevent its own destruction in a nuclear war.
Strategic Party
Supreme Authority.
Sovereignty
Provides basis for order.
System
A physical place ruled by the Caliph.
Caliphate
A school of thought that explains international relations in terms of power.
Realism
Emphasizes international law, mortality, and international organizations, rather than power alone, as key influences on international events.
Idealism
The ability or potential to influence other behaviours, as measured by the possession of certain tangible and intangible characteristics.
Power
The ability to maximize the influence of capability through a psychological process.
Power of Ideas
The ratio of power that two states can bring to bear against each other.
Relative Power
Total GDP, population, territory, geography and natural resources are all examples of this.
Elements of Power
Use of geography as an element of power.
Geopolitics
In IR theory, a term that implies not complete chaos but the lack of a central government that can enforce rules.
Anarchy
Shared expectations about what behaviour is considered proper.
Norms
A state’s right, at least in principle, to do whatever it wants within its own territory; Traditionally, sovereignty is the most important international norm.
Sovereignty
A situation in which actions that states take to ensure their own security are perceived as threats to the security of other states.
Security Dilemma
The general concept of one or more states power being used to balance that of another state or group of states.
Balance of Power
The half dozen or so most powerful states.
Great Powers
States that rank somewhat below the great powers in terms of their influence on world affairs.
Middle Powers
A version of realist theory that emphasizes the influence on state behaviour of the systems structure especially the international distribution of power.
Neorealism
A theory that the largest wars result from challenges to the top positions in the states hierarchy, when a rising power is surpassing the most powerful state.
Power Transition Theory
One state’s holding a preponderance of power in the international system.
Hegemony
The argument that regimes are most effective when power in the international systems is most concentrated.
Hegemonic Stability Theory
The ease with which the members hold together an alliance.
Alliance Cohesion
The distribution of the costs of an alliance among members; the term also refers to the conflicts that may arise over such distributions.
Burden Sharing
A US led military alliance, formed in 1949 with mainly West European members, to oppose and deter Soviet Powers in Europe. It is currently expanding into the former Soviet bloc.
NATO ( North Atlantic Treaty Organization )
A Soviet led Eastern European military alliance founded in 1955 and disbanded in 1991. It opposed the NATO alliance.
Warsaw Pact
A bilateral alliance between the United States and Japan, created in 1951 against the potential Soviet threat to Japan. The United States maintains troops in Japan and is committed to defend Japan if that nation is attacked, and Japan pays the United States to offset about half the cost of maintain the troops.
US Japanese Security Treaty
A movement of third world states, led by India and Yugoslavia, that attempted to stand apart from the Us-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War.
Nonalignment Movement
The threat to punish another actor if it takes a certain negative action ( specifically attacking one’s own state or one’s allies ).
Deterrence
The threat of force to make another actor take some action ( rather than, as in deterrence, refrain from taking an action ).
Compellence
A reciprocal process in which two or more states build up military capabilities in response to each other.
Arms Race
Actors conceived of as single entities that can think about their actions coherently, make choices, identify their interests, and ranks the interests in terms of priority.
Rational Actors
The interest of the state itself.
National Interest
A calculation of the costs incurred by a possible action and the benefits it is likely to bring.
Cost-Beneficial Analysis
A branch of mathematics concerned with predicting bargaining outcomes. Games such as prisoner’s dilemma and chicken have been used to analyze various sorts of international interactions.
Game Theory
One actor’s gain is equal to another’s loss.
Zero- Sum Games
A situation modelled by game theory in which rational actors pursuing their individual interests all achieve worse outcomes than they could have by working together.
Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD)
Mutual dependence between states.
Interdependence
An approach that stresses the importance of international institutions in reducing the inherent conflict that realists assume in international system.
Neoliberal
A set of rules, norms, and procedures around which the expectations of actors converge in a certain issue area.
International Regime
The formation of a broad alliance of most major actors in an international system for the purpose of jointly opposing aggression by any actor; sometimes seen as presupposing the existence of a universal organization to which both the aggressor and its opponents belong.
Collective Security
The proposal that democracies never fight each other.
Democratic Peace
A movement in IR theory that examines how changing international norms and actors identities help shape the content of state interests.
Constructivism
An approach that denies the existence of a single fixed reality and pays special attention to texts and to discourse - that is, to how people talk and write about a subject.
Postmodernism
Meanings that are implicit or hidden in text rather than explicitly addressed.
Subtext
A categorization of individuals based on economic status.
Economic Classes
A branch of socialism that emphasizes exploration and class struggle and includes both communism and other approaches.
Marxism
The development and implementation of peaceful strategies for settling conflicts.
Conflict Resolution
The use of a third party in conflict resolution.
Mediation
The glorification of war, military force and violence.
Militarism
A peace that resolves the underlying reasons for war; not just a cease fire but a transformation of relationships, including elimination or reduction of economic exploitation and political oppression.
Positive Peace
A centralized world governing body with strong enforcement powers.
World Government
Movements against specific wars or against a war and militarism in general, usually involving large numbers of people and forms of direct action such as street protests.
Peace Movements
A strand of feminism that believes gender difference are not just socially constructed and that views woman as inherently less warlike than men.
Difference Feminism
Emphasizes gender equality and views the “essential” differences in men and women’s abilities or perspectives as trivial or non-existent.
Liberal Feminism
An effort to combine feminist and postmodernist perspectives with the aim of uncovering the hidden influence of gender in IR and showing how arbitrary the construction of gender roles is.
Postmodern Feminism
Refers to polls showing women louder than men on average in their support for military actions, as well as various other issues and candidates.
Gender Gap
