Summer is typically the time when academics take a step back. Freed from their teaching loads, refreshed by long vacations, they finally have time to take stock of recent developments in their fields and examine their ever-expanding horizons—the methods, theories and subjects motivating compelling new research. In this spirit, the Cambridge Review of International Affairs is pleased to offer this latest issue of our thirty-first volume, focused on novel expansions of the field of International Relations (IR).
The first article, authored by Alan Chong and Jun Yan Chang, demonstrates how aviation disasters are not simply tragic events that take place during transit between states, but also a vital topic of enquiry for IR. Drawing on IR literatures on emotions, ‘security competition by proxy’ and international scrutiny of domestic governance, the authors compellingly demonstrate that international aviation disasters do not simply demonstrate the failings of multinational corporations. They are also events with tremendous international stakes that can inflame international tensions.
The issue’s second contribution from Leonard Schuette deals with another subject of increasing interest to IR scholarship in recent years—‘collective memory’. Though the term originally stems from work in sociology, Schuette demonstrates how collective memory of Nazism plays an important role in German foreign policy debates on the European refugee crisis. Next, the issue turns to two countries on the European Union’s (EU’s) borders—Greece, an EU member, and Turkey, an aspiring entrant. Dimitris Tsarouhas and Nüve Yazgan attempt to answer an age-old question in IR—how increased trade impacts interstate conflict—by examining this curiously understudied dyadic case study on Europe’s periphery. Their mixed-methods approach, which includes ample data analysis and elite interviews, demonstrates that increased trade and cultural engagement between the countries has ‘fail[ed] to translate into conflict resolution at the political level’, an insight with broad applicability to multiple IR debates.
The next article in the issue focuses on Kazakhstan, a country that has been largely neglected in mainstream IR since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Maxat Kassen, a professor at the Eurasian Humanities Institute in Astana, examines in depth how Kazakhstan’s unique soft power strategy shapes its role in international affairs. The largest landlocked country in the world, Kazakhstan is both a transcontinental power (bridging Asia and Europe) and a neighbour to two major powers (Russia and China), making it a fascinating country for IR analysis, worthy of far more examination.
Finally, this issue concludes with an article focused on discourse analysis methods, which have become increasingly popular in genealogies and historically oriented IR in recent years. Dillon Stone Tatum argues that discourse analysis in IR would benefit from randomized selection of texts rather than the ambiguous methods past scholarship has employed. He demonstrates that random selection is not simply a means of ensuring that the texts analysed in a discourse analysis are representative, but also a new way of thinking about discourse analyses’ logic in the larger methodological toolbox employed by IR scholars.
The editorial team at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs thanks you for engaging with this issue and encourages you to read more on our blog ‘CRIA Views’, hosted by the University of Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies’ In the Long Run (www.inthelongrun.org).
University of Cambridge
Lucia J. Linares
University of Cambridge