Implementing Environmental Peacemaking: The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park Between Institutions, Actors, and Interests
Publisher: York Centre for International and Security Studies
Author(s): Thomas Abeling
Date: 2011
Topics: Conflict Causes, Land
Countries: Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe
In the last three decades, what was identified as the “Third Great Debate” in International Relations (IR) (Lapid, 1989) have seen a growing number of critical authors1 working and writing to reveal the flaws, injustices, and biased perspectives that characterized traditional frameworks of analysis, theories, and discourses in IR2 . Efforts to develop renewed theoretical frameworks and to engage meta-theoretical debates in (critical) security studies are thus closely linked to similar developments in the field of IR. The emergence of critical or reflexivist (Keohane 1988) approaches brought along new perspectives to analyze and understand the world and traditional approaches. These existing approaches have been targeted as discourses that maintain insecurity, and consequently have been seriously challenged and undermined. Reflecting on this vast disciplinary process, Yosef Lapid declared in 1989: “the third debate [marked] a clear end to the positivist epistemological consensus”.
However, after decades of effective challenges against the traditional theories, we have come to realize that, even if the perspectives that are offered by critical authors are intellectually revealing, the theoretical and disciplinary structure in IR has mostly remained the same. Indeed, the most recent studies on the discipline, such as Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Waever’s last book on IR scholarship around the world (2009) or the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Projects, show that a majority of researchers and disciplinary institutions are still engaged toward conventional/traditional approaches, particularly in the United States. The most recent TRIP report for example shows that 58% of the respondents in this country identified their work as strictly or partially rationalist, while this proportion rises to 63% in Ireland, 67% in Singapore, and 54% in Israel (Jordan et al., 2009: 11). Also, at least 65% of the respondents in the United States, Israel, and Hong Kong also identified their work has epistemologically positivist (Ibid: 7). Proportions reported are lower in other Anglo-Saxon countries, but in regards to the indicated results and the enduring weight, if not centrality, of the American academy in IR, it is clear that the critical approaches did not succeed in producing a clear ‘rupture’ with the disciplinary past.