This 40-page document contains my lecture notes for Actors in World Politics. It includes all of the multiple choice questions and answers about the readings from The Transnational Studies Reader. My grade for this exam was 8.5.
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LECTURE 2: INTERNATIONAL, GLOBAL, TRANSNATIONAL
I. THE WORLD HAS BECOME GLOBAL
1. Dimensions of globalization
• Four main dimensions of globalization
1. People
§ Migration — Most migration is South-South
2. Capital: Globalization of trade
§ Most trade, up until the 40s and 50s, was between rich-rich countries
§ Today, most trade is between rich-non-rich and non-rich-non-rich countries
3. Politics: Globalization of politics
§ Example: Terror attack, Bayonne (France) 2019: 80-year-old attacks a Mosque
4. Culture
§ Pacific Rim: films as global products to appeal to the whole world
§ Global culture: cultural dominance of the US, languages are becoming extinct while
English is becoming dominant
2. Globalization as a series of processes
1. Deterritorialization
o The process through which geographical territory becomes less of a constraint on social
interactions
2. Interdependence
o The process through which “security and force matter less and countries are connected by
multiple social and political relationships"
o Less about war, more about social, political, economic relationships
o Keohane and Nye in Power and Interdependence (1997)
o Example: War in Democratic Republic of Congo (1998-2003)
§ Coltan mining financed serious conflict in the Congo
§ Directly connected to the needs of the West
3. Time-space compression
o The set of processes that cause the relative distances between places (i.e., as measured in terms
of travel time or cost) to contract, effectively making such places grow “closer"
o David Harvey (1990) The condition of Postmodernity
o Example: the time it takes to go from Brussels to London
II. INTERPRETING GLOBALIZATION: MAKING SENSE OF GLOBALIZATION (3 APPROACHES)
1. The International Relations approach
• The world is divided in domestic/international (domestic/international divide)
o Domestic - the rule of law, police, judges
o International - state of nature?
• States are the main actors of IR
o States as unitary actors with autonomy and particular behavior
• Other actors exist but they are negligible (non-state actors negligible)
• Mearsheimer - The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
2. The globalist approach
• World divides are flattened
• Undifferentiated investment surface
• Decreased relevance of states
• Thomas L. Friedman - The World is Flat
o With the end of the Cold War, the world is flattened, becoming one big market and states
matter less and less
o What matters is corporations, clients, migrants
o We live in a borderless world
3. The transnational critique
• Analytical purchase: A problem of analytical purchase
o Relations develop between states and non-state actors
o States adapt to globalization: transgovernmentalism
, • Conceptualization: A problem of conceptualization: an either/or conception
• Is the world really borderless? Visas as barriers. Divided between domestic and international?
• Assumption of the course: transnational actors interact in different forms with states; those states
are becoming increasingly transnational
III. DIRECTIONS FOR A TRANSNATIONAL APPROACH
1. The territorial trap
o States do not have exclusive power over territory
o Domestic and foreign realms are not separate
o Boundaries of the state are not the boundaries of society
o John Agnew: we are misrepresenting the world
2. Sovereignty as relational: Sovereignty is not absolute, but relational (re-thinking sovereignty)
o Rule existed in other forms (city-state, monarchies, empires)
o Territorial state is a recent invention (19th century)
o No strict division domestic/international
o Transnational elite networks/transgovernmentalism
o Afghanistan: governed by warlords
3. Spatiality as networked: The space of power is not homogeneous, but is made of networks (re-mapping
the territory)
o Unified territorial control has a history
o Effective territorial sovereignty as a myth
o Power operates much more through networks
o Transnational social fields
o Italian government: not the same amount of power in the center of Rome vs the suburbs of
Palermo
4. Identities are not homogeneous: identity as multiple and hybrid (re-imagining national identities)
o Nationalism is historically determined
§ nationalism: one nation becomes to one territory
o Identities have never entirely fit territorial borders
o Globalization has reinforced discrepancy
o Hybridity rather than homogeneity
CONCLUSION
• Globalization means people, capital, politics and culture are increasingly interconnected across the
globe
• Globalization is a complex set of processes of deterritorialization, interdependence and compression
of time and space
• Academic theories have debated the disappearance or persistence of the nation-state in the face of
globalization
• This debate is grounded in problematic premises summarized by the notion of the “territorial trap”
• 3 main concepts of international politics need to be examined
o Sovereignty as relational
o Spatiality as networked
o Identity as multiple and hybrid
KEY CONCEPTS
1. Globalization 4. The territorial trap
2. Deterritorialization 5. Nation-state
3. Interdependence 6. Sovereignty
TRANSNATIONAL RELATIONS AND WORLD POLITICS: Robert Keohane & Joseph Nye
1. Context
• Realism dominates IR
o Focus on states
o Focus on security (war and peace)
o Neglect for economic issues
,2. What are the authors mostly concerned about in this article?
• Finding out the effects and implications of a new type of international relations
The text’s main research questions (p. 24)
• What is the effect of transnational relations?
• What are the implications of transnational relations for theory?
• What are the implications of transnational relations for power relations?
• What are the implications for US foreign policy?
• What are the challenges for International Organizations?
3. Which of the following are transnational interactions?
• 2001 attack of Al Qaeda on the Twin Towers in New York
• Support of the Vatican for political opponents to communism in Poland during the Cold War
• Last meeting of the Chaos Communication Congress, an international meeting of hackers and
computer experts
Transnational interactions: “transnational interactions” is our term to describe the movement of tangible or
intangible items across state boundaries when at least one actor is not an actor of a government or an
intergovernmental organization (p. 25)
4. According to Keohane and Nye, which of the following transnational interactions
• Transnational coordination of student movements against the war in Iraq in 2003
• Erasmus year of Jaap, a Leiden University student, at the university of Bielefield
Some effects on interstate politics (pp. 27-31)
1. attitude changes: face to face interactions
o Jaap abroad
2. international pluralism: linking of interest groups
o environmental activism
3. constraints on states through dependence and interdependence: transport and finance
o finance organized at the global level; impact on state decision making
4. increase in the ability of certain governments to influence others: transnational corporations
o Nigeria - big foreign oil companies, Costa Rica - influence of banana companies
5. Autonomous actors with private foreign policies that may deliberately oppose or impinge on state policies
o Roman Catholic church, Banks
5. Do Keohane and Nye argue that governments are losing control?
• It’s an empirical question that needs to be determined by research
Transnational relations and “loss of control” by governments (p. 31)
• States remain the most powerful actors
• Transnational relations create a control gap: an empirical question
Transnational relations and the state-centered paradigm (p.32)
• Are state-centered theories thus inadequate to study world politics? Yes
• We need to change the definition of world politics
o “all political interactions between significant actors in a world system"
o in which a significant actor is any somewhat autonomous individual or organization that
controls substantial resources
o and participates in political relationships with other actors across state lines
6. According to Keohane and Nye, what is the overall effect of transnational relations on equality in
international system? (P.)
• They reinforce the inequalities between rich and poor countries
, Transnational relations and values
• They enrich and strengthen the strong and rich
• Could be considered as imperialism
• Keohane and Nye: better speak of a system of “asymmetries” and “inequalities"
LECTURE 3: SOVEREIGNTY AND THE NATION-STATE
I. FROM THE TRANSNATIONAL TO THE NATIONAL
Main points of the day
• Transnational flows pre-exist the nation-state and have shaped it
• The nation-state is often a violent project aimed at reducing the world into the “national” and the
“international"
o Nation-states are the result of wars, massacres, forced exile and forced imposition of
homogenous national culture
o History of violence — violence is constitutive
o Division between national/domestic made possible by sovereign states
• Nation-state formation is also a project aimed at forgetting the transnational nature of world politics
o Processes of violence construction have been forgotten
o “Italy has always existed and will always exist"
Definitions
1) The state (Mann, 1984)
1. A set of institutions and their related personnel
o Institutions: soldiers, police, civil service
2. A degree of centrality with political decisions emanating from this center point
3. A defined boundary that demarcates the territorial limits of the state
4. A monopoly of coercive power and law-making ability
o Coercive power: power to enforce the law (police)
2) The nation (Smith, 1991)
• A named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a
mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.
o Kurdistan, Palestine — nations without a state
o Lebanon, Afghanistan, Switzerland — states without a nation
II. THE FORMATION OF STATES
1. People and institutions before the nation-state
1. Political institutions
§ Kings, Lords, religious organizations, free towns, empires, city-states
§ Different forms of power that don't necessarily overlap
§ Multiplicity of forms of political organization
2. Communities
§ Before nations as communities we had distinctions between different social status
§ Middle ages — status mattered
§ Peasants vs the bourgeoisie
§ Nobles and aristocrats spoke different languages from their
territories', married between each other, didn't necessarily
communicate with the rest of the people
§ Italy: people spoke different languages and eventually unified around a
common language, Italian
2. Why did states appear?
1. Extracting resources for war
2. Bureaucracies and political institutions
3. Charles Tilly
§ Why did states appear? Because rulers needed cash for war, to pay soldiers and expand
their territory. They got that money from taxation.
§ Emergence of bureaucracy — to extract resources for war
§ States are just successful crime operations: protection in exchange for money
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