Test #1 Flashcards
The relationship among the world’s state governments and the connections of those relationships with other actors, with other social relationships, and with geographical and historical influences.
International Relations
The problem of sharing interests versus conflicting interests among the members of a group.
Collective Action / Free Riding / Burden Sharing / The Tragedy of the Commons / Prisoner’s Dilemma
The problem of how to provide something that benefits all members of a group regardless of what each member contributes to it.
Collective Goods Problem
A principle for solving collective goods problems by imposing solutions hierarchically.
Dominance
A principle for solving the collective goods problem by rewarding behaviour that contributes to the group and punishing behaviour that pursues self interest at the expense of the group.
Reciprocity
A principle for solving collective goods problems by changing participants preferences based on their shared sense of belongings to a community.
Identity
Distinct spheres of international activity ( such as global negotiations ) within which policy makers of various states face conflicts and sometimes achieve cooperation.
Issue Areas
The types of actions that states take towards each other though time.
Conflict and Cooperation
A subfiles of international relations that focuses on questions of war and peace.
International Security
The study of the politics of trade, monetary, and other economic relations among nations, and their connection to other transnational forces.
International Political Economy
A territorial entity controlled by a government and inhabited by a population.
State
Head of government.
State Leader
The set of relationships among the world’s states, structured by certain rules and patterns of interactions.
International System
Most large nations; Nations whose populations share a sense of national identity, usually including a language and culture.
Nation States
The size of a state’s total annual economic activity.
GDP ( Gross Domestic Product )
Actors other than state governments that operate either below the level of the state or across state borders.
Non-Stae Actors
Organization whose members are state governments.
Intergovernmental Organizations ( IGO’s )
Private organizations that interact with states, multinational co-operations, other NGO’s and intergovernmental organizations.
Non-Governmental Organization (NGO’s)
Companies that span multiple countries.
Multinational Corporations
A perspective on IR based on a set of similar actors or processes that suggest possible explanations to “why” questions.
Levels of Analysis
Concerns the perceptions, choice, and actions of individual human beings.
Individual Level
Concerns the aggregations of individuals within states that influence state actions in the international arena.
Domestic Level
Concerns the influence of the intentional system upon outcomes.
Interstate/ International / Systemic Level
Seeks to explain international outcomes in terms of global trends and forces that transcend the interactions of states themselves.
Global Level
The increasing integrations of the world in terms of communications, culture, and economics; May also refer to changing subjective experiences of space and time accompanying this process.
Globalization
The disparity in resources between the industrialized relatively rich countries of the West and the poorer countries of Africa, the Middle East and much of Asia and Latin America.
North-South Gap
An organisation established after WWI and a forerunner of today’s United Nations; It achieved certain humanitarian and other successful successes but was weakened by the absence of US membership and by its own lack of effectiveness in ensuring collective security.
League of Nations
A symbol of the failed policy of appeasement, this agreement, signed in 1938, allowed Nazi Germany to occupy a part of Czechoslovakia. Rather than appease German aspirations, it was followed by further German expansions; which triggered WWII.
Munich Agreement
The hostile relations -punctuated by occasional periods of improvement, or détente - between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, from 1945 to 1990.
Cold War
A policy adopted in the late 1940’s by which the United States sought to halt the global expansion of Soviet influence on several levels - military, political, ideological and economic.
Containment
A rift in the 1960’s between the communists powers of the Soviet Union and China, fuelled by China’s opposition to Soviet moves towards peaceful co-existence with the United Staes.
Sino-Soviet Split
A meeting between heads of states, often referring to leaders or great powers, as in the Cold War superpower summits between the United States and the Soviet Union, or today’s meetings of the group of twenty on economic coordination.
Summit Meeting
A superpower crisis, sparked by the Soviet Union’s installation of medium ranged nuclear missiles in Cuba, that marks the moment when the United Staes and the Soviet Union came closest to nuclear war.
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
Wars in the third world - often civil wars - in which the United Staes and the Soviet Union jockeyed for position by supplying and advising opposing factions.
Proxywars
Neither side can prevent its own destruction in a nuclear war.
Strategic Party
Supreme Authority.
Sovereignty
