POLS 170 Blog Group 5

       The United Nations is an intergovernmental organisation that promotes peace around the globe through aid, action, commitments, and support. Its mission is to maintain international peace and security. Although, through looking at various interventions in the UN’s history, it can be seen that this supposedly harmonising organisation has claimed peace in areas even when it has not been fully reached. In one of my classes, we look into how media portrays events incorrectly especially in regards to feeding into the White superiority complex, ignoring colonialist histories, and not blaming external countries and organisations for ultimately harmful interventions. While looking for such a document to critique, I came across an article by the UN titled “Their 15-year mission a success, the UN peacekeepers depart a stable and grateful Liberia”. With some knowledge of Liberia’s present, it can be deduced that it is not in a stable or peaceful state. After the two d...

  In Abdelal and Ruggie’s writing, The Principles of Embedded Liberalism: Social Legitimacy and Global Capitalization , the regulation of world trade after the free trade years after World War II, or from 1945-1970, was a huge topic of debate. Embedded liberalism is the core theory of Abdelal and Ruggie’s article, as it is to protect trade from being dominated by a select number of powerful nations. An organization that embedded liberalism is shown is the World Trade Organization that we as a class discussed. As a trading system it has involvement from most countries, with the non-members being around ten to fifteen third-world countries, and it has economic advantages to the United States. However, the World Trade Organization really is only beneficial to the multinational corporations themselves, and not necessarily the smaller, underdeveloped nations involved.      I see the World Trade Organization similarly to the recent Netflix show “Squid Game” . In the show, ...

  I was extremely interested to learn about the global financial structure as outlined by Susan Strange in her 1990 article, “Finance, Information, and Power.”  Strange describes how structural power is tied to the finances of a country and makes note of all the nuances of the discrepancies in finances between countries, like exchange rates, credit systems, and rates of interest.  This article raised my attention to an international system, which I had never really considered to be an aspect of international relations before, the global financial system.  Strange explains how this system has grown to become more global in recent times, stating how the system “has shifted from being a predominantly state-based system with some transnational links to being a predominantly global system with some local differences (Strange 260).”  In this course, we have covered so much material that describes how nations cannot come together and how conflicts arise, as well as h...

Thomas White Professor Shirk Blog Post 3 10.27.2021 Why US Debt to China is a Political Facade         The media in the United States is, for the most part, privately funded. Massive corporations whose goals may include having an educated populace, however, this is not their main focus. Educating citizens is superseded by turning a profit, so news outlets want headline-driven stories that inspire clicks. The 21st century is all about clicks, and the news media is no different. Alike to the news media, one of the best strategies for Politicians in the modern American political climate is to be controversial while stoking fear of change into the hearts of American voters. Fear is a tactic that has been prevalent for decades, however, the click-driven media inherently props it up. Issues regarding jobs, immigration, and terrorism have all been manipulated by fear-mongering to push agendas that have had dire consequences. One of these examples is the national d...

  Susan Strange writes in her paper, Finance, Information and Power , “The integration of the world economy has been achieved through the bringing together of national financial systems into one global system.” (Strange, 259-260) This global system has played a massive role in the global economy and capitalism throughout the world as it connects many powerful countries and large economies in a way that many benefit. Strange’s main focus was on the comparison of the US and Japan and their relational and structural power, yet she mentions the use of technology throughout the conversation of the global system.  In this blog post, I will discuss the role technology has on humans, which is connected to government involvement in those innovations, and how the role of government should continue like the “embedded liberalism” Rawi Abdelal and John G. Ruggie wrote about. In my foundation class, From Fire to Uber, we focus on the role technology has played in the development of human ev...

In class on Monday, we discussed a Susan Strange article from 1990, entitled Finance, Information and Power . This article explained the different implications of relational and structural power of countries on the world stage, and provided a very relevant and nuanced analysis of these differences. However, in class, we dove into a debate on whether the structural power of the US was still at the level that it was when Strange originally wrote the article. Was the US structural hegemonic power still comparable to countries like Japan’s relational power? Although our discussion explored many interpretations of the downward trend in US Hegemonic power, a rather underexplored aspect of this debate is the role of Covid-19 in the decline of US Hegemonic Power. In this blog post, I will argue that the US’s handling of the pandemic, in addition to all of the other factors we discussed in class, has contributed to a major decline in US Hegemonic power since the release of Strange’s 1990 articl...

 The indications of a failed state can be thought of as the economic, political, and social instability of a state and when security and control within a state are not met. Just by reading these aspects of states, a general consensus of the distinction of which states are believed to be failed states and non-failed states are made. Usually, the states that are considered failed (in the present) are found to be in the Global South. This immediate assumption tends to erase the histories of these states and awards them with full responsibility of their ‘failure’. Farmer discusses the idea of how “the erasure of history is subtle and incremental and depends upon the erasure of links across time and space” in his article titled “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” (2001). The erasure of history is severely detrimental to states as they are denied the origin of many of their issues. Such as in the case of Jamaica being colonised by the United Kingdom. Jamaica was left with no susta...

    Nikitia Lalwani and San Winter-Levy's article, Is the World Getting Safer, which was published for the website, Foreign Policy, critiques the opinion of Steven Pinker that our world is becoming safer due to humans becoming less violent.  The book which Lalwani and Winter-Levy are analyzing is " The Better Angels of Our Nature , a bestseller with a bold thesis: Almost every form of violence, including war, was on the decline. "  In this book, Pinker theorizes that due to the rise in popularity and the normalization of enlightenment values, the world is more peaceful than ever before.  Lalwani and Winter-Levy do not agree with this idea, countering that some of our largest conflicts have occurred within the last century.  They also add that " the Cold War was the most conflict-ridden period since the Napoleonic Wars; the end of the Cold War was the first time the rate of conflict initiation fell in nearly 200 years. "  They do include that ...

  Thomas White     Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, is typically taught as law and inherent to global politics. Often, the theory is misconstrued, something that I myself never fully understood. It is not just that the world will be destroyed if there is another nuclear war; a nuclear war cannot happen due to the resulting chaos. This is typically not emphasized when discussing this theory, as the view gives the impression that the destruction is more key, not the actual peace that results from it. In some ways, this is dangerous, as it misconstrues how people view this idea, and it clouds what should be asked; does the atomic weapon protects us all?     MAD is typically seen in many global theories and politics as an inherent truth, but some believe it should not be considered a fact. There has only been one true international affair that the concept of MAD has acted in, which was the Cold War. There was peace in their states, created by both the...

         The question is presented, should Iran have a nuclear bomb? Kenneth N. Waltz would say that Iran should have a bomb. Waltz’s logic for this topic is presented in his article Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability with the quote, “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have. There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear armed states” (Waltz, 5). Waltz’s take is that nuclear weapons from rival countries would counteract each other. I disagree as I feel that Iran does not need a nuclear weapon due to the fact that Iran has supported attacks on US military bases recently and due to the fact that they have an ally with a nuclear bomb.      For as long as human beings have roamed the earth, there has been serious conflict in the Middle East. In July, 2021 there according to the usnews.com, “ The U.S. and Iran were poised for a dangerous escalation in violen...

  Eli Webb International Relations Blog Post #2 Ever since 1991, international relations experts and many other people, see the United States as the sole power in global power politics and the question begins to be asked, is this unipolarity at the brink of ending, or will it continue to be the US's number one and all other countries below us? The competition in the discussion right now is Russia and China mostly and Brazil and India as well. John Ikenberry writes in The Illusion of Geopolitics that “even if China and Russia do attempt to contest the basic terms of the current global order, the adventure will be daunting and self-defeating. These powers aren't just up against the United States”, they are up against so much more that he continues to discuss about, but most of it is led by or involves the US. (Ikenberry, “The Illusion of Geopolitics, pg. 8) Ikenberry is saying there is no shot China and Russia equal themselves to the United States. Yet, through my experiences a...

     There is no doubt that the controversy surrounding President Biden’s recent decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan is justified. Opposing sides continue to argue about Biden’s handling and planning of the situation, and whether or not troops should have stayed there indefinitely. But the largest question these debates seem to circle back to is whether or not the Afghanistan pull out was inevitable. In my opinion, it is clear that withdraw from Afghanistan was bound to occur, and the sooner it occured, the better. As the article, Every Option in Afghanistan was Bad , explains, “the Afghan government couldn’t stand on its own, and the security forces couldn’t hold the country, despite 20 years of international support.” Clearly, the inability of Afghanistan to support itself, as well as the “instability and non-cohesive nature of the Afghan state,” was not something that Biden, or any American president could have solved. (Disentangling the disaster in A...