One cannot understand the nature of international relations today only by looking at traditional geopolitical maps and absorbing strategic reflections. One must take the leap and consider these societies bursting into areas once reserved only for diplomacy. From that point of view, the communications revolution that came in the 1980s with the ICT (information and communication technologies) boom, was to play a fundamental role even in transforming social behavior. It affected telematics, the multimedia, audiovisual and telecommunications sectors, in other words sounds, images, and information. Indeed, it affected everyone, from the most powerful to the destitute living in the shantytowns of the South. It established itself as the great innovating factor, the main producer of a deeply transformed worldwide arena. Never had international relations been so shaken up by technological change. One could even go so far as to say that this break was of even greater importance than the invention of the atom bomb, in a more progressive and often less visible way. Nuclear arms only modified one aspect of international life, admittedly a determining one but still sector-based. The communications revolution overturned all the parameters upon which the Westphalian system had been built, and affected individuals deep down. It was the real factor of globalization that lastingly revolutionized the planet.
First, the revolution turned upside down the distance effect at the heart of international politics. That ancient and basic parameter had given meaning to territoriality and allowed it to build a preliminary concept of the international system. It also enabled nations and nationalisms to be established and to singularize each political unit and its historic trajectory on the world map. It was this distance effect that once gave a decisive advantage to the governors over the governed. Only the governors could overcome distance thanks to their sovereign instruments, while the governed were in some sense separated from one another by virtue of the vicissitudes of nation-building. Lastly, distance guaranteed sovereignty . States were all the more sovereign if their potential adversaries were far off and possessed only limited means of reaching them. Remoteness was a guarantee of stability, protection, order, and assertion.
With widespread communications anyone could establish contact with anyone, at whatever distance and above all without being limited by borders. As technology became more sophisticated, people had to learn how to live in a world where there were no longer 50, 100 or 193 actors (the number of member states in the UN), but 7 billion potential actors liable to engage in a whole series of international actions while ignoring or circumventing their leaders’ choices and flouting any concern with sovereignty .
This quiet revolution—which indeed never gave rise to any spectacular or dramatic rifts—gradually built up the dynamic of globalization , with absolute discretion at first. This enormous upheaval started to be perceptible while the world was still totally ensconced in bipolarity and in the comfort of a conceptual universe that encouraged it to minimize anything that might shake it up.
The Invisible Revolution of Societies and Nation-States
The quiet communications revolution had an even deeper impact than the mere deconstruction of the effect of distance. It outdistanced traditional international relations, which should rather be called “interstate relations,” through a whole network of “intersocial” relations. As civil societies freed themselves from the burden of state constraints and social actors became more autonomous, including with respect to their national community, world politics would become increasingly characterized by the predominance of intersociality over internationality.
The job of teaching and research in international relations was itself transformed! Everything now had to be revised according to this new intruder, all the more discreet as it was almost never designated as such and had no real institutional manifestation. This absence of institutionalization was both a strength, because it guaranteed a kind of protective invisibility to intersocial relations , as well as a weakness, to the extent that it made it very difficult to create established partnerships. Intersociality is a fundamentally ambiguous phenomenon because it creates opportunities—for cooperation, support and mobility—, while paving the way for a whole range of perils: the rise of local and national social conflicts on a worldwide scale, the increasing role of identity-based and religious parameters, the globalization of social frustrations, inequalities and intolerance. Power fades in acknowledging the devastating effects of rampant and badly handled urbanization, the spectacularly decreasing age of populations in the South and the increasing age of those in the North. Unemployment, particularly troublesome in the youngest societies in the South, constricted regional then international politics. At first it was a source of mobility, then of conflict. Anger arising from the failure of human development was now being expressed in a globalized world of imagination. Yesterday’s destitute had horizons limited to their local society, whereas today they are quick to perceive themselves as part of a world where they also see the wealth it flaunts and its indifference toward them. That globalized imagination is increasingly the crux of fundamentally social situations of conflict. All the diplomatic strategies on earth and all the weapons in the world cannot do a thing against it.
Intersociality also involves all the social, individual and collective actors, migrants, or on the contrary investors, multinational corporations and NGOs , international media, preachers on the internet and institutional churches interacting hundreds of thousands of times every day, making and remaking the global arena, without being subject to any decrees. Finally, it is the trivialized meeting of intermingled cultures, but which are also used to assert distinct identities.
The famous “clash of civilizations” is one of the most emblematic analytical frameworks resulting from these transformations. The image, as simplistic as it is intellectually convenient, is from Samuel Huntington . 1 Since we are no longer alone, clearly a culture can no longer organize the world by ignoring others, the behavior they exhibit, their ways of seeing, thinking and perceiving themselves. Under the effect of increasing exchanges, globalization inevitably leads to an ever-expanding hybridization of cultures that were once separate and distant. On the other hand, positing the premise of their irreducibility in the form of a “clash of civilizations” is a way of preparing on a daily basis a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stigmatizing the other, suggesting the superiority of what one is, pointing out sartorial and culinary distinctions, attaching a political order—or, worse, a social contract—to a given culture amounts to fabricating exclusion, ghettoizing globalization and preparing confrontations that have no reason to exist. It is turning intersociality into a new matrix for war , reproducing on the scale of globalization the “ war -making/state-making” that was the core of the Westphalian system . Except that the latter was capable of inventing the balance of power to limit its own damage, whereas the “clash of civilizations” denies any choice of balance by clinging to the principles of hierarchy and antagonism.
Individuals and social actors have become—in a more or less orderly way—the mediators of a more global than international political game that has confined governments, diplomats, and their armies to an essentially reactive role. Resorting to the traditional weapons used by states, their reactions tended to miss the mark and aggravate the disputes increasingly opposing the latter and social actors. What the wars of decolonization had begun to establish now took on an importance that the weight of Westphalian memory forbade them from imagining.
Social behavior thus became the focus of international politics, disqualifying traditional strategic analysis, deterritorializing conflicts, understating the importance of their sovereign nature. Resentment, humiliation , frustration and suffering were the everyday lot of the new international relations. Not only was one no longer alone in the world in dealing with the new states, but one was also no longer isolated from the innumerable social politics that are a part of the everyday diplomatic agenda.
In that area, a long prehistory at first blocked any challenge to the Westphalian dogma. Perhaps it even reinforced it at first. Intersociality is formed through a long-term process involving the difficult emergence and discovery of the social element within different national communities in the making. The social and political were from a certain standpoint completely separate at the dawn of our modern era. Due to the inertia of modes of governance, to the weight of caste and class hierarchies, but also to less developed means of communication, societies seemed destined to live outside the political, on the level of sociological reality in some way. In rural society, political relations presumed a faculty of communication that was practically non-existent from a technical standpoint. One learned very belatedly about wars being conducted, or that the king had died and already been replaced by his successor.
The first phase of the emergence—and politicization—of the social aspect was specifically linked to the rise of the first forums for debate in the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. 2 These new spaces were linked to the city and to increasing exchanges. Its cafés, theaters and literary salons were places for sociability and dialogue that intensified relations between social and political spheres. That intensification was gradually reflected in the sphere of international relations, largely preserved from any intrusion of social issues during the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution in 1789 was responsible for changing that situation. Citizens in arms, the mobilization of societies behind political causes, the mission conferred on soldiers of the year II to go and liberate the oppressed people of Europe were all symptoms of a transformation in the essence of international relations. The nature of war in particular was changing. It was no longer a tournament between princes, but rather a mobilization of societies in the service of a political cause. This was the premise of the nineteenth and twentieth century nationalisms founded on the “imagined community” 3 of citizens made into a people through the techniques of rising communications and state mobilization.
In this dynamic of fusion or gradual hybridization of the social and political, the state and nation were made to be reconciled, providing the Westphalian system some respite. They shared a respect for borders and for communication remaining chiefly within them. The state was no longer merely the dynastic center. It was becoming an organized political community that perceived itself as such and was manifested in more and more omnipresent and sustainable institutions, and in increasingly abiding affects. This is what really formed—and continues to form—the strength of nationalism .
How the Social Took Over Key Geostrategic Considerations
One can imagine the turn of events when communications changed gears and were no longer merely a matter of circulating information inside the national sphere, but of broadcasting it on a worldwide scale. Thus the use of TAT-8 fiber-optic cables, laid down in 1988 to communicate between the two sides of the Atlantic, immediately caused such an increase in exchanges that there was no longer any difference—technically at least—between a national and an international exchange. It was no longer simply merchandise crossing borders but ideas, sounds, and images. This created a space of quasi-immediacy on a relational level that soon granted all social actors truly international status.
All these factors contributed to producing the everyday reality of what is known as soft power , a new multifaceted decision-making entity that, depending on the case, could complement, complicate or destabilize traditional power politics . There was also, if not an international public opinion, at least a public opinion about international issues, in fact an increasing interaction between national opinions capable of forging certain representations of global issues that hitherto had been virtually absent from traditional diplomatic relations.
This then was the new stage, and these were the actors. But, with this same trend, the plot was also changing, to the extent of redefining the very nature of key international issues. Indeed, this was the real revolution affecting international relations: henceforth social issues had caught up with and outstripped political and military considerations. Major social issues on an international level have turned out to be far more determining and to provide more structure than geostrategic elements. It is the pace of advances and failures in economic and social development, and oddly of what is known nowadays as “human development ” that defines the real framework for international competition, tensions and conflicts.
One of the most telling examples of this evolution involves analyzing conflicts, which have changed profoundly. Instead of being the effect of competition for power, as in the days of interstate politics, they appear to be the effect of weaknesses linked to the collapse of states, social breakdowns, the failure experienced in building civil societies and social bonds, economic disasters and human insecurity factors.
These are so many factors that are liable to gradually drive whole societies to warfare and transform peaceful—or at least not very conflict-driven—social entities into truly warlike societies. With the rise of the social dimension in the international arena, weakness has thus won out over power through its aptitude for defining the new relationships governing the world stage. One need only look at the classification of countries based on the Human Development Index (HDI) 4 and their geographical distribution. The map of the lowest HDIs coincided almost perfectly with the map of contemporary armed conflicts. At the bottom of the list are countries in the Sahel such as Mali, Niger, Chad; farther to the east are Eritrea and Somalia, and farther south, the Central African Republic, the countries in the Great Lakes region and the Congo Basin. In Asia, the HDIs are generally superior to those in other African countries, but Yemen and Afghanistan , two war -torn nations, are coincidentally at the bottom of the list.
Thus social distress is usually closely linked to the proliferation of potentially conflictual ideological dynamics. And, more generally, this “socialization” of global issues has completely shaken up the familiar categories of international relations: going from sovereignty to interdependence, from the primacy of power to the destabilizing role of weakness, from territoriality to mobility, from a Clausewitzian reading of war founded on the clash of states, to conflicts linked more to the breakdown of societies. Here again, it is the entire Westphalian system that has been called into question. Another grammar of war has arisen, mainly outside the scope of the old world.
The Two Globalizations and the Revenge of the Local
One should however be wary of thinking that this socialization of global issues, itself linked to the dynamics of globalization , only concerns developing societies. That would be forgetting that intersociality is also at work in developed countries, where its main ambiguities lie. Seen from the North, one may quickly come to the conclusion that globalization has led to the victory of multinational corporations, to the enriching and strengthening of the most well endowed, and the submission of the poor to the rich. Intersociality has indeed had this effect in hegemonic countries that imposed the law of the marketplace with respect to the Welfare State that was finding it hard to adapt. The most advanced states felt— and still feel—threatened by these new transnational forces, embodied for instance by giant firms that often have a higher turnover than their own GDP and avoid taxes through fiscal optimization.
Nevertheless, looking at globalization from the South, the reality seems more subtle and complex. One can see that a globalized world may also create opportunities, gradually opening up a vast field of dissent leading to societies that are bursting onto the political scene— admittedly still in an uncertain and somewhat disorganized way—, accelerating mobilization and political awareness, even creating support networks from parts of the South to others and from North to South. It is as if there were two globalizations. One that is accelerating the awareness of actors, whoever they may be, prompting them to fight against a dictator trying to be appointed president for life or against a polluting waste management facility that multinational corporations are forcing on some megacity in the Gulf of Guinea, particularly in Ghana, the Ivory Coast or Nigeria. Meanwhile the other is putting people under the control of the marketplace, pointing to pressure on food distribution networks, blocking industrialization, strengthening customer relations for the benefit of a small local oligarchy.
Neither of these two globalizations has conclusively won out over the other. Contrary to some of the altermondialist rhetoric, no one can claim that the dictatorship of international capitalism was firmly and sustainably established through globalization . Social before inevitably becoming economic, globalization will evolve depending on what world diplomacy does with it, in other words not much for the time being. Imagine that food insecurity has never been the subject of any debate on the UN Security Council, and health security has only been discussed twice! Worse still, world diplomacy continues to approach these issues through interstate relations, thus creating one of the most gigantic vicious circles. In doing this, it marginalizes even more social actors capable of innovation and promotes even more fossilized and corrupt local states, further aggravating the situation.
Another pitfall consists in believing that globalization is the negation of things local. This would be a naive and distorted vision of the phenomenon. Essentially, globalization does not automatically sanction the victory of the global taken literally, but rather fuels the revenge of the social versus the political. The latter, by definition, cannot be globalized. It is blended in with the construction of the city, necessarily based on delimitation if not on sovereignty . When involved in globalization , one partly leaves behind the political to come within the framework of the social, in widespread (economic, cultural, and even expostulatory) exchanges. Thus the huge consequences of global governance and the extraordinary difficulty of reinventing the political sphere on that scale. But if the social aspect is expressed while ignoring or circumventing borders, then it must be built on a new basis. It will then mobilize references known to all and, of course first and foremost, local society. It is for this reason that the local has resurfaced today with such vigor, and that globalization has not eliminated particularisms, quite the contrary.
This return to identity-based particularities has allowed individuals to find their bearings in the new global arena. Thus, all progress in globalization is translated by localist and identity-based forms of expression. They are more localist when the individual feels safe regarding the construction of this new global arena; on the other hand, they become identity-based when threatened. The identity-oriented symbol is then displayed in a dissenting and exclusive way, in an attempt to shut down the globalization narrative. This includes the main base for European populism, as well as all the variants of fundamentalism which, from Islam to Hinduism and from Christian fundamentalism to extremist currents in Judaism, are part and parcel of the daily news.
But the rise of the local may be expressed through open activism, such as in major cities that have embarked on projects of international cooperation, the NGOs that create transnational coalitions of actors in local civil society, or again the interregional cooperation developing all over, beyond borders, mountains, and rivers … Here we can see one of the positive and triumphant faces of what is sometimes known as “glocalization.” Regional Europe ultimately turns out to be far more active that the community’s institutions, whereas Asia, so strained in its nationalist and sovereignist postures, has offset those relics from a world it did not choose through “natural economic territories,” informally linking Taiwan and continental China , bringing together Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian rivals in “growth triangles” and even prompting a “Hong Kong of the North” around the Tumen River, allying for a time, although with some difficulties and prevarication, China , Russia, Japan , Mongolia, South Korea and … North Korea!
Beyond this revival of the local, globalization has stimulated oppositional behavior. Thus, concord and mobilization alternate, as if to indicate that the new world is destined neither for consensual utopias, nor for confrontational implosion. In designating globalization , the American sociologist and political analyst James Rosenau has quite rightly evoked the concept of “turbulence.” 5
The individual who perceived himself for generations as strictly rooted in the local or national now stands in relation to a world that he is often ignorant about and discovers abruptly, often at his own expense. To him, globalization has naturally become a public forum for protesting against the global injustice and inequality that are destabilizing local areas. One of the first effects of intersociality has thus been to scale up a whole range of protests that are all the more unbridled for no longer being addressed solely to the prince, the one in charge of the city, but to the supposed “masters of the world,” to all those whom one rightly or wrongly thinks are controlling and defining the international order . A new public space is thus emerging. The old canonical protesting that grew out of our Western history is no longer alone in the world.
This new oppositional discourse draws from the globalized imagination referred to earlier, not a uniform ideological entity recurring as before all over the planet, but based on the contrary on a whole range of opportunistic hybridizations between local and global. The resulting new rhetoric of contention is based both on the global imagination and on local “resources of meaning” that reinforce its credibility and vitality. The complexity and wealth of social forums and recurring forms of worldwide dissent that have grown out of the great Seattle demonstration in November 1999 at the WTO summit are witnesses of it. Lastly, this contention has now taken as its target not only the nearby elites, but all those perceived as responsible for the world order—or disorder. Globalization has thus generated a tremendous dynamic of generalized accusation in its most diverse forms: anti-Westernism, anti-imperialism, the denunciation of “crusaders” or infidels, the rhetorical repertoire changing depending on the nature of the actor.
The qualitative difference between this contemporary “Westernophobia” and more traditional forms of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism should be pointed out. The nature of anti-colonialism was to fit in with an espoused national framework. The “anti-colonial moment” was, in this regard, a great time of celebration of the virtues of the state and nation, including in many countries in the South that had only an insufficient and often distorted understanding of it. One worshipped the state without having really experienced any prior state culture. It was desired and validated, being perceived both as a tool for emancipation from the colonizer and as a space for a separate and distinct group within the international system. During the time of the independence movements, it was a preglobalized context. One should not forget that the bulk of decolonization was conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, when the concept of globalization did not even exist and its reality was rarely perceived and totally embryonic. Once countries in the South had acquired independence, the scene changed, giving way to the collapse of these “imported” states for which some had fought so hard, to their being bogged down in a series of dysfunctional dynamics, then to their transformation into extremely oppressive authoritarian machines that soon lost all legitimacy. With the failure of the state, new identities were substituted and mobilized in the social fabric that were essentially community-based, tribal or religious in nature. And as globalization was gradually discovered, borders and territories no longer played as crucial a role as they had during the phase of anti-colonial mobilization. The denunciation of failed states then went hand in hand with the start of globalized mobilization. Thus the highly sensitive nature of this postcolonial evolution that has had an increasing influence on world governance.
The new contention generated by globalization is no longer really aimed at the parent state, but at a global world held responsible for the main woes, even while being perceived as the only body capable of delivering them from their situation of extreme poverty: through the possibilities opened up by migration or through activating various forms of transnational solidarity. This new world is designated as both guilty and unjust but also as a source of the greatest hope. For the migrants fighting today against the barbed wire on the borders of Hungary and Slovenia, Europe remains an infinitely greater provider of employment, comfort, and security than the world they came from. If you think about it, in the first decade of this century, the active population only increased by 15 million in the developed countries, but by 445 million in the developing countries; while Italy has seen its workforce decrease over the past fifteen years, Nigeria has gained 25 million more… Paradise has thus earned a place in the imagination and succeeded in mobilizing people! But this paradise whose shores one hopes to reach is also made up of territories such as “9-3” 6 in France or Molenbeek in Belgium that no one seems to know how to integrate and that harbor men and women who risk at times perceiving themselves as both victims of globalized modernity and as combatants mobilized against an unfair and ungodly order.
Toward a New Sociology of International Relations
It goes without saying that this emergence of the social dimension in the world arena has been a true shock for international relations studies. With regard to this abrupt challenge to established patterns and conceptual routines, two ways of reacting can be seen: on the one hand, a posture of ignorance that was an encouragement to act as if practically nothing had changed; and on the other hand, a courageous but incomplete attempt to take a totally fresh look at the discipline. I would point out that the denial of reality achieved a certain measure of success. In the community of researchers in international relations, it mainly drove the dominant trend, the “realists” of every persuasion who still see international relations as the preserve of states clinging to their own power. 7 From their point of view, power politics continues to be the basic element in international relations, and the emergence of new economic, social and cultural factors remains a marginal phenomenon that has not fundamentally modified the behavior of states or their diplomacy.
This response was all the more tempting in the days of the Cold War and “peaceful coexistence,” which bipolarity seemed to preserve, in a way “freezing” traditional concepts of power politics . The denial of reality continued well beyond that, and among those practicing it themselves. A former French minister of foreign affairs recently explained that societies and public opinion should not interfere with diplomacy, that it was beyond their competence, and that allowing public opinion into the diplomatic arena would be like welcoming a sick person’s family into the operating room.
If one were to take that strange metaphor a bit further, one could point out that social actors have long been in the operating room and it would be wise to accept them there, even if it means making them put on sterile scrub suits. It is totally unrealistic to think that we can keep them out of the room on a long-term basis. In reality, not only is the success of professional diplomats not always guaranteed, but the incompetence of non-governmental actors is far from pre-determined. In certain situations it is even the NGOs ’ actions that have most actively contributed to reestablishing peace, as illustrated by the examples of Aceh and Mozambique. In the first case, the Henry Dunant Center for Humanitarian Dialogue played a remarkable role in the negotiation process between 2000 and 2002, which led to peace between the secessionist rebels from the north of Sumatra and the Indonesian government. In the second case, no one could overlook the contribution of the Sant’Egidio community in finding a solution to the civil war that pitted the Renamo against the Frelimo from 1976 to 1992… These practices—commonly known as “track II diplomacy”—were far from negligible, mobilizing private actors gladly welcomed into the operating room.
The reaction was altogether different on the part of the neoliberals. 8 For them, this upsurge of the social dimension only confirmed their original intuition, legitimizing aspirations too long deemed utopian. At the heart of neoliberalism , the virtues of exchange and of the individual heralded the time when societies would usher in peace. Thus, they welcomed with enthusiasm the arrival of non-governmental actors into international politics, but assumed that it would only occur through a generalization of trade and the triumph of democracy. The Wilson doctrine continued to be their main inspiration.
They therefore remained in a state of wishful thinking, short of what the social dimension was really trying to say and what this new era would bring. Let me be clear. The main issues linked to the contemporary crisis in international relations have arisen not so much from the dynamics of democratization or the intensification in economic exchanges, rather they are linked first of all to the state of social disintegration affecting a certain number of countries. Far from obeying any linear teleology of Western democratization that only needs to be encouraged through the old recipes valid anywhere and anytime, this new sum of conflicts and social tensions requires the use of new tools of political intervention. It also awaits new narratives of international cooperation that cannot foresee the aspirations of various emerging non-governmental actors. Democratic engineering is often illusory, formal, attached to the naive idea that voting is all it takes for a democracy to exist, disregarding the fact of obtaining beforehand essential public freedoms and above all building a minimum of social bonds capable of fostering a real social contract. The huge volume of literature of a liberal bent devoted to “transitology” appears to have forgotten this.
In fact, the sudden appearance of this social aspect in the international arena encompasses both the best—for instance, the fifteen million people who marched on February 15, 2003 to oppose the war in Iraq —and the worst, such as the community, tribal and religious tensions fueling multiple forms of radicalism in all societies no longer able to establish themselves as states. The reality is far more complex and difficult to grasp than certain liberal illusions might lead one to believe.
The alternative to these two conceptual stalemates consists in constructing a true sociology of international relations that would lead to two major perspectives. First, international relations should not be seen as a separate sphere. It is made up of social phenomena like any other, it too is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives even if on a particular scale. Secondly, the configuration of international relations no longer complies with, and will most likely never again comply only with state initiatives, for the latter are increasingly destined to react to social dynamics rather than to act upon them. This social dynamic is made up of profound changes such as the intensification of communications, development, urbanization, demographic pressure, migratory reality, social mobility, the collective imagination, and social violence. And let us not forget the weight of humiliation , frustration, failure and anger which have become some of the inescapable social passions of international life. The latter now evolves far more to the pace of anger in society than to the diplomacy of “cold state monsters.”
The world was not made in one day, and neither were the sciences. Will we be capable of creating a subtle and fair sociology of international relations within an acceptable time frame that is up to the demands and challenges of our times? To be sure, there have already been some remarkable efforts in that direction. 9 And yet it is hard to see how a new discipline is being created that would be more empirical than theoretical. The time has probably come to return to the great founders of the social sciences: Durkheim , Weber, Marx and Tönnies. 10 International relations must no longer be merely an analysis of the configurations of power, it must also establish itself as the science of the “tectonics of societies.”
Notes
- 1.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
- 2.
Jürgen Habermas , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
- 3.
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 2006 [1983]).
- 4.
This index established by the UNDP in 1990 measures human development by matching the gross income per inhabitant with purchasing power parity, life expectancy and level of education.
- 5.
James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
- 6.
9-3 is a vernacular name for the French département 93, which includes a number of Parisian suburbs with a reputation for being “troublesome.”
- 7.
Robert Ned Lebow , “Realism in International Relations,” in International Encyclopedia of Political Science, tome 7, eds. Bertrand Badie, Dirck Berg-Schlosser, and Leonardo Morlino (Thousand Oaks, Los Angeles: Sage Publisher, 2011). As a theory of international relations, realism constructs its analyses on the preeminent role of power, leading each state to compete on the international scene with the exclusive goal of optimizing its national interests.
- 8.
Claiming allegiance to the principles of freedom and individualism, the neoliberals in international relations, contrary to the realists, advocate promoting rights and exchanges, and power limited by institutional intervention.
- 9.
Of particular note: the work of James Rosenau (1924–2011), whose seminal book, Turbulence in World Politics, op. cit., was published precisely at the time when the bipolar illusion was collapsing, in 1990.
- 10.
Guillaume Devin, ed., Dix concepts sociologiques en relations internationales (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2015).