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Governing Anarchy: A Research Agenda for the Study of Security Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Emanuel Adler  and
Michael N. Barnett
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Abstract

Adler and Barnett demonstrate how changes occurring in international politics create the nostalgia of security communities, a concept made prominent by Karl Deutsch nearly forty years ago. The realist-based models in security debates are giving way to the constructivist approach to possibilities of peace by establishing communities rather than by balancing power. By thinking the unthinkable - that community exists at the international level, shaping security politics and developing a pacific disposition - the authors intend to draw attention to the concept's importance for understanding contemporary events.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 10 , March 1996 , pp. 63 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1996

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References

1 Deutsch, Karl, Burrell, Sidney A., Kann, Robert A., Lee, Maurice Jr., Lichterman, Martin, Lindgren, Raymond E., Loewenheim, Francis L., and VanWagenen, Richard W., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957Google Scholar).

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6 Deutsch et al., Political Community, 30–31. Ernst Haas similarly argues that “modern nation-states” can be thought of “as communities whose basic consensus is restricted to agreement on the procedure for maintaining order and settling disputes among groups, for carrying out well-understood functions.”Haas, , Beyond the Nation-State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), 39Google Scholar.

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24 For fuller critiques of Deutsch, see Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, “Pluralistic Security Communities: Past, Present, Future,”Working Paper on Regional Security, no. 1 (Madison: Global Studies Research Program, University of Wisconsin, 1994); and Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, “Security Communities in Comparative and Historical Perspective,” paper presented at a conference on “Security Communities in Comparative Perspective,” sponsored by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, New York, December 1–2, 1995. Also see Lijphart, Arend, “Karl W. Deutsch and the New Paradigm in International Relations,” in Merritt, Richard L. and Russett, Bruce M., eds., From National Development to Global Community: Essays in Honor of Karl W. Deutsch (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 246Google Scholar; and Donald J. Puchala, “Integration Theory and the Study of International Relations,” in ibid., 157.

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34 Deutsch confused the matter by suggesting that peaceful change means avoiding “large-scale physical force.” Deutsch et al., Political Community, 5. That states might engage in “small-scale” physical force or periodically threaten the use of force stretches most understandings of a pluralistic security community. Yet he has a point: a dyad within the community might go to war without necessarily leading the researcher to declare the end of the community; after all, murders occur within communities without necessarily defining their endGoogle Scholar.

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36 Emanuel Adler, “Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations,”Working Paper on Political Relations and Institutions (Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1995). The sociological literature on communities and networks similarly recognizes that communities need not be tied to physical space but rather are dependent on ties and relations. See Wellman, Carrington, and Hall, “Networks as Personal Communities”Google Scholar.

37 For the U.S.-Israeli case, see Barnett, “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East”; for the Australian case, see Richard Higgott and Kim Richard Nossal, “Australia as a Liminal State,” paper presented at a conference on “Security Communities in Comparative Perspective,” sponsored by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, New York, December 1–2, 1995.Google Scholar

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