Natural Cosmopolitics presents a spacepower theory that is designed to help policy makers and strategists understand what spacepower is and how states can use it to their benefit. What is offered is a holistic treatment of spacepower that includes the security, civil, and commercial space sectors. It shows how states can employ spacepower as another element of national power in the pursuit of security, prestige, and wealth. Unlike other attempts to produce a spacepower theory that draw on analogies to airpower, seapower, or groundpower, natural cosmopolitics traces its roots from the Big Bang forward. Discussions include the evolution of the Universe, space itself, the solar system, life on Earth, the current state system, and contemporary geopolitics within international relations. Spacepower is presented as a natural outcome of these evolutionary forces, strategically the same as the practice of power in the other operating environments, because the same political processes with the same motivations drive it. It is shown that the advent of spacepower has ushered in a revolution in strategic perspective. The global perspective of the Columbian Epoch is fading away as humanity comes to appreciate the Earth as a tiny little planet in a modest solar system in a Universe that may be filled with more galaxies than people. From this, general and specific principles of natural cosmopolitics are presented along with an analytical tool to help strategists anticipate how other states may respond with spacepower to various stimuli. The role of spacepower in both war and peace is also discussed. Finally, the threat of catastrophic asteroid impacts is analysed and the hypothesis is tested that states will cooperate to provide a planetary defence.

This thesis addresses the question; do media set the agenda in the foreign policy domain? Previous work in this area has focused on American decision making in crisis situations. This thesis uses Greek-Turkish relations as a case study and traces the interaction over time. Within this framework, politicians and media are considered to be the two strongest links of the foreign policy making chain. Politicians on the one hand have the political power, while media on the other have the power to transmit their version of reality. In this process neither the political personnel, nor the journalists or the media organizations are alone. This research investigates the impact of three sets of elements organizational, political and national on media-politician interaction. The study starts by identifying the core elements for each of the three sets and puts them into the context of foreign policy: press-party parallelism, elite consensus and national interest are the intervening variables, while policy preferences and images of the "other" are the dependent variables. The comparison of the parliamentary and the press agenda across a 4-year time period reveals that at distinct points of time each of the intervening variables leads to variations in the news text. Both the agendas are assessed through content analysis, while a longitudinal perspective is adopted in order to see who sets the content of the discussion and who follows. The analysis reveals that the seeds for a change of policy positions is first monitored in the parliamentary agenda and then in the newspapers. However, newspapers are adopting harder positions compared to the political discourse, which is by nature more restrained. That is, also, evident in the way media construct the image of the "other", without hesitating though to abandon hard-line positions for a public expression of sympathy, when events call for it. This research also verifies that political engagements are subordinate to national cause in times of crisis, while media partisanship does not seem to be that obvious in the coverage of foreign policy issues.

The main purpose of this thesis is to reformulate the concept of international society, as it is predominantly used within the discipline of International Relations. In particular, this work analyses the conception of international society defined as a society of states, which is associated with the work of the so-called 'English school'. An important recent development within the discipline of International Relations is the attempt to develop a notion of international society which is able to overcome the ontological divide between domestic and international politics. This work should be seen as part of the same intellectual enterprise. The thesis starts by explaining the meaning of the expression "ontological divide" between domestic and international politics. In addition, it is claimed that the adoption of such a divide characterises the statist approaches to the study of international society. In the first part, two central points are addressed. First, how the English school developed the concept of international society as a reaction against the tradition of realpolitik, specifically against a definition of the states system in terms of a state of war. This work then discusses why the notion of the society of states has ultimately failed to avoid the ontological divide. In the second part, building on the republican political tradition, this thesis attempts to elaborate a conception of international society which escapes the ontological divide between domestic and international politics. It does so by developing the ideas of the international common good, mixed polities and divided sovereignty, and the international constitutional and ideological structure. As a result, this work reformulates the concept of international society, conventionally defined as a society of states. The thesis concludes by outlining the importance of this argument for the study of international relations.

The thesis examines the concept of community in international relations theory. It is my contention that articulating the concept of community as the sovereign state in international relations ultimately places limits on political space, hampering the extent to which the discipline is able to understand and explain the varieties of global politics and political actors that increasingly affect international relations. The thesis argues that in order to redefine political space, it is necessary rearticulate the meaning of community in international theory. To examine the feasibility of rearticulation, the thesis focuses on international theory. The first chapter sets out the problem of political space in international relations, arguing that it tends to be rather narrowly and problematically demarcated by the sovereign state. With the meaning of community in international relations therefore in need of rearticulation, the second chapter turns to social theory for a concept of community that is not framed by the sovereign state, and argues that the concept of community may be understood by way of three components: territoriality, identity and the political. The subsequent three chapters examine exemplars from international theory for each of these three components. These three chapters consider the extent to which it is viable to seek rearticulation, what this might involve and the extent to which it is already underway in international relations. The thesis determines that rearticulation is possible, given that the existing work on territoriality, identity and the political suggests that the necessary conceptual tools are already employed in the discipline and are applicable for rearticulating the meaning of community. Moreover, with the addition of work from social theory, the thesis concludes that rearticulation is not only feasible but also essential. The conclusion sets out what is required to continue the process of rearticulating the meaning of community in international theory.

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Debates concerning international justice are now integral to the discipline of international relations. Among the most pressing of these ethical and legal dilemmas is the matter of whether the use of force can be justified for humanitarian purposes, or for the protection of human rights. Although a wealth of theorists have taken aim at this issue, it is the contention of this thesis that only the 'ontology of becoming' (an idea which is traced through all branches of constructivist theorising) boasts the conceptual and analytical force to successfully and thoroughly appraise the relationship between humanitarian intervention and international justice. In developing this claim, this thesis seeks to hybridise constructivism with a number of other theories which employ the arguments associated with the ontology of becoming, including: cosmopolitanism, communitarianism, solidarism and feminism. The purpose of this process is to demonstrate the ways in which this branch of international relations theory can both enrich, and be enriched by an account of what might be thought of as a 'constructed duty of justice'. Ultimately, this thesis asserts that adherence to the requirement of institutional feasibility dictated by the ontology of becoming necessarily limits the agenda for the reform of international society. However, those normative developments which can withstand the restrictions brought to bear by the consensual nature of international politics do provide the means for international society to advance, albeit incrementally and inconsistently, toward an increasingly prominent role for considerations of justice.

This thesis uses the prism of Liberia’s post-conflict experience to explore the centrality of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of children to the success of peacebuilding efforts. Until recently, the concept and process of child DDR has either been completely ignored, subsumed as part of adult processes or has been treated by academics, policymakers and international organisations as a peripheral issue in attempts to consolidate peace and security. This thesis seeks to fill this crucial gap in the literature by analysing each step of the DDR programme in Liberia, carefully isolating childspecific causalities, interventions and implications from the broader peacebuilding processes. Based on this disaggregation, it argues that addressing the needs of child soldiers through a comprehensive and dedicated child-specific DDR programme has not only been vital to the achievement of short, medium term, and long-term peacebuilding objectives in Liberia, but should also be considered an essential “peace” of the puzzle in other pertinent post-conflict situations.

The communal revival that began in the mid-1960s developed into a new mode of activism, ‘communal activism’ or the ‘commune movement’, forming its own politics, lifestyle and ideology. Communal activism spread and flourished until the mid-1970s in many parts of the world. To analyse this global phenomenon, this thesis explores the similarities and differences between the commune movements of Denmark, UK and the US. By examining the motivations for the communal revival, links with 1960s radicalism, communes’ praxis and outward-facing activities, and the crisis within the commune movement and responses to it, this thesis places communal activism within the context of wider social movements for social change. Challenging existing interpretations which have understood the communal revival as an alternative living experiment to the nuclear family, or as a smaller part of the counter-culture, this thesis argues that the commune participants created varied and new experiments for a total revolution against the prevailing social order and its dominant values and institutions, including the patriarchal family and capitalism. Communards embraced autonomy and solidarity based on individual communes’ situations and tended to reject charismatic leadership. Functioning as an independent entity, each commune engaged with their local communities designing various political and cultural projects. They interacted with other social movements groups through collective work for the women’s liberation and environmentalist movement. As a genuine grass root social movement communal activism became an essential part of Left politics bridging the 1960s and 1970s.

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No description available.