A Bakhtinian Approach to EU–Turkey Relations
This article proposes that dialogue between the EU and its candidate countries should be institutionalised in the EU accession framework. Using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, it argues that the current deadlock in EU–Turkey accession negotiations is partly due to a lack of genuine dialogue between the parties. In the current structure, Turkey has been finalised, closed and determined in its image as the ultimate other vis-à-vis Europe. For the relations between the EU and Turkey to move forward, Turkey should be allowed to speak and answer back in the formal framework of the accession process.
Foreign Policy and the Politics of Alterity: A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations
Trying specifically not to fall into either eclecticism or redundancy, this paper is an attempt to develop a dialogical understanding of international relations within the meta-theoretical field of constructivism. Dialogism holds that the social world is constructed through an interweaving of mutually-responsive discourses between several agents. Further, it provides an interpretative tool, the hermeneutical locus, to understand agents' identities as a factor in international relations by discerning their expressivity, contextuality and relationality. Dealing more closely with the questions of identity and identity formation within the discipline of International Relations, the paper further regards national identity as a factor which is expressed in a particular aspect of foreign policy: the politics of alterity. Grounding my approach in the works of the Russian intellectual Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, in the first part of the paper I define what is to be understood by dialogism and its constitutive notion of transgredience. The second part is dedicated to the actual integration of dialogism within the discipline of International Relations. An example drawn from Japanese domestic and foreign policy prior to the Second World War further facilitates the comprehension of the theoretical argument concerning the link between the national and the international in a politics of alterity.
Total Lobbying : What Lobbyists Want (and How They Try to Get It)
1. Studying lobbyists and lobbying 2. Lobbying and lobbyists in the United States: a primer 3. Public policy lobbying, part 1 4. Public policy lobbying, part 2 5. Land-use lobbying 6. Procurement lobbying 7. Summary and conclusions.