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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

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.

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Articles
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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5 Ibid., see also the following works by Deutsch: Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Political Community at the International Level: Problems of Measurement and Definition (New York: Doubleday, 1954)Google Scholar; Politics and Government (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970)Google ScholarPubMed; and his essays in Jacob, Philip E. and Toscano, James V., eds., The Integration of Political Communities (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964Google Scholar): “Communication Theory and Political Integration,” 46–74, “Transaction Flows as Indicators of Political Cohesion,” 75–97, “The Price of Integration,” 143–78, and “Integration and the Social System,” 179–208.

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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25 We thank John Ruggie for this suggestion.Google Scholar

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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.

35 Ibid., 6Google Scholar

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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47 John Hall argues that while “the creation of new social identities by intellectuals—that is, their capacity to link people across space as to form a new community—is necessarily a rare historical phenomenon,” it is one that scholars of international relations need to take seriously. “Ideas and the Social Sciences,” in Goldstein, J. and Keohane, R., eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 51Google Scholar. Similarly, Iver Neumann claims that identity is inextricably linked to a “region-building approach,” where the existence of regions of common identity are preceded by region-builders who imagine spatial and chronological identities and who, by means of discourse, talk and write these regions into existence within a permissive political context. , “A Region-Building Approach to Northern Europe,” Review of International Studies 20 (1994), 5374CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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