International decision making enables superpowers to make key decisions about the world economy, conflicts or environmental issues. This power is mainly held in the hands of inter-governmental organisations (IGO’s) some IGOs involve all nations, such as the U.N., whereas others are more exclusive such as the G8, or regional such as NATO. These IGO’s are important for superpowers to maintain their status as it allows them to focus global policy and decision making in their own interest. For example most IGO’s operate a veto voting system, where if a certain country with veto does not agree to the policy then the vote is not carried out. Many superpowers use this to their advantage, for example the EU and the USA tend to vote with each other, giving them the opportunity to block policies they do not agree with, therefore allowing them to force their own policies. This makes it difficult for smaller nations with less power to have a role in international decision making.…
Buzan, B. 1997. Rethinking Security after the Cold War. Cooperation and Conflict. Vol. 32, No. 1: 5-28.…
The era of globalization has witnessed the growing influence of a number of unconventional international actors, from non-governmental organizations, to multi-national corporations, to global political movements. Traditional, state-centric definitions of foreign policy as "the policy of a sovereign state in its interaction with other sovereign states is no longer sufficient. Several alternative definitions are more helpful at highlighting aspects of foreign policies.…
World order are the activities and relationship between the world states, and other significant non-state global actors, that occur within a legal, political and economic frame work. The need for world order has arisen due to the past historical conflicts, colonialism, greater interdependence between nations, and the increased impact of the activities of nation states upon other nation states. Legal measures such as the UN, as well as non-legal measures such as the media and Non-governmental organisations, show a mixed effectiveness in response to resolving conflict and working towards world order.…
Over the course of the years world history has continued to change. New conflicts are constantly developing. In order to keep these conflicts under control special foundations and laws such as the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights have been founded. Despite the creation of the United Nations and the issuance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conflict has continued in the post-World War II era. The attempts at keeping peace have and have not been effective since conflicts around the world keep reoccurring…
Kegley (2007) mentions that the failure of the League of Nations, brought about the creation of the United Nations in 1945. Following the planning of the American, British and Soviet allies for a new international organization to maintain peace and security, the United Nations came into existence on 24 October 1945. Today, the United Nations has many departments that deal with vast global issues mainly humanitarian, economic and social. The creation of the United Nations has also brought the birth of other organizations such as the European Union in 1993 and the World Trade organization in 1995. Internationally, the living standards of many have positively changed since the founding of the United Nations…
The united nations, a union of countries founded in 1948 have strived to achieve rights for all of civilisation through the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, over the course of its founding it has achieved this goal in substantial ways, allowing for individual freedom and liberty of children previously enslaved, discriminated and stripped of rights. But has also been unsuccessful to promote and allow freedom for the many people still stripped of their rights in countries that are a part of its organisation.…
Ikenberry’s three elements of constitutionalism require a shared agreement, set binding and authoritative limits on the exercise of power and lastly, institutions are entrenched in the wider political system and not easily altered. From this, many of the organizations follow these alignments and are successful because of it. In the case of the United Nations they maintain a list of rules which, function to set limits on the amount of force allowed to be used in order to maintain constitutionalism. In addition, each country added to the United Nations must go through an extensive application process followed by immediate membership effective upon the date of the General Assemblies decision. According to Jeane J. Kirkpatrick “United Nations shapes matters in the long run not the short and help to shape interactions and agendas in bodies as remote” (Kirkpatrick 1). The political system is not something that can be changed in an instant. Many sanctions are in place in order to make it “not easily altered”. This being stated we can see that Ikenberry’s elements can be seen to be constitutionally in order. The UN allows for many countries to live in peace; become successful economically and even politically and has done so since it was…
This article develops a theory of liberal international order that captures its major structures, institutions, and practices. Distinctive features mark postwar liberal order- co-binding security institutions, penetrated American hegemony, semi-sovereign great powers, economic openness, and civic identity. It is these multifaceted and interlocking features of western liberal order that give it a durability and significance.…
Among the favourable signs are the steadily growing strength of the steps towards world order taken initially near the beginning of this century in the creation of the League of Nations, succeeded by the more broadly based United Nations Organization; the achievement since the Second World War of independence by the majority of all the nations on earth, indicating the completion of the process of nation building, and the involvement of these fledgling nations with older ones in matters of mutual concern; the consequent vast increase in co-operation among hitherto isolated and antagonistic peoples and groups in international undertakings in the scientific, educational, legal, economic and cultural fields; the rise in recent decades of an unprecedented number of international humanitarian organizations; the spread of women's and youth…
After the cold war, changes in globalization occur, such as changes in the aspect of economy, politics, social, and culture, with regards to interstate relations. These changes cover bilateral, regional, and multilateral, to contemporary issues such as environment, human rights, democratization, liberalization of trade, and others. The order of current international relations is also bustled with the rise new non-governmental actors which are actually influential to the political aspect of a state, such as…
Theory – a set of propositions and concepts that seeks to explain phenomena by specifying the relationships among the concepts; to predict phenomena. The purpose of theory is that it helps guide us toward and understand of which various explanations are necessary and sufficient explanations for events. Hypotheses –statements positing a particular relationship among two or more variables.…
Picking out an inter-governmental organization is no walk in the park; a person must have an overall arching topic that interests the individual. For me I have always been interested in human rights and how there are so many countries in violation but nothing is being done about it. I will be looking into the United Nations Human Rights Council. This paper will analyze various aspects of an inter-governmental organization called the United Nations Human Rights Council by looking at why global governance is necessary to deal with this issue, what current work is being done on the issue, policies and laws current in effect, what countries are playing lead roles in finding solutions, and proposals I have made to deal with the issues.…
T H E past decade global politics has changed fundamentally in two ways. First, it has been substantially reconfigured along cultural and civilizational lines, as I have highlighted in the pages of this journal and documented at length in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Second, as argued in that book, global politics is also always about power and the struggle for power, and today international relations is changing along that crucial dimension. The global structure of power in the Cold War was basically bipolar; the emerging structure is very different. There is now only one superpower. But that does not mean that the world is unipolar.A unipolar system would have one superpower, no significant major powers, and many minor powers. As a result, the superpower could effectively resolve important international issues alone, and no combination of other states would have the power to prevent it from doing so. For several centuries the classical world under Rome, and at times East Asia under China, approximated this model. A bipolar system like the Cold War has two superpowers, and the relations between them are central to international politics. Each superpower dominates a coalition of allied states and competes with the other superpower for influence among nonaligned countries. A…
This paper begins by outlining the definitions and what exactly is meant by international relations. Secondly, it tells the story of how and why the study of international relations emerged when it did, during the course of modern history. Even though, the history and the origins of this discipline alone does not reveal everything we need to know about how international relations functions in this day and age, it certainly would help us to understand the legacy left behind by this study’s original purpose, international gains and calamities, and by its traditional schools of thought; explanations starting from the time of the Great Powers, to the French Revolution, the first of the alliances, the Industrial revolution, the two World Wars along with the consequent Cold War, the formed international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, and finally, to where international relations stands today.…