Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Practical Normativity/Normality: Investigating Practices beyond the Public Space

This essay examines how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may shape international norms. Following a brief discussion of the ways in which AI technologies pose new governance questions, we reflect on the extent to which norm research in the discipline of International Relations (IR) is equipped to understand how AI technologies shape normative substance. Norm research has typically focused on the impact and failure of norms, offering increasingly diversified models of norm contestation, for instance. But present research has two shortcomings: a near-exclusive focus on modes and contexts of norm emergence and constitution that happen in the public space; and a focus on the workings of a pre-set normativity (ideas of oughtness and justice) that stands in an unclear relationship with normality (ideas of the standard, the average) emerging from practices. Responding to this, we put forward a research programme on AI and practical normativity/normality based on two pillars: first, we argue that operational practices of designing and using AI technologies typically performed outside of the public eye make norms; and second, we emphasise the interplay of normality and normativity as analytically influential in this process. With this, we also reflect on how increasingly relying on AI technologies across diverse policy domains has an under-examined effect on the exercise of human agency. This is important because the normality shaped by AI technologies can lead to forms of non-human generated normativity that risks replacing conventional models about how norms matter in AI-affected policy domains. We close with sketching three future research streams. We conclude that AI technologies are a major, yet still under-researched, challenge for understanding and studying norms. We should therefore reflect on new theoretical perspectives leading to insights that are also relevant for the struggle about top-down forms of AI regulation.

Global health diplomacy in Mexico: insights from key actors in the field

BACKGROUND

Global health diplomacy (GHD) focuses on the actions taken by diverse stakeholders from different nations -governments, multilateral agents, and civil society- to phenomena that can affect population health and its determinants beyond national borders. Although the literature on conceptual advancements of GHD exists, empirical studies about how health becomes an issue of relevance for foreign policy are scarce. We present an analysis of the entry processes of health into the foreign policy and diplomatic domains in Mexico from the perspective of key informants of three different sectors.

METHODS

A purposive sample of high-rank representatives of three sectors involved in GHD was designed: Two from Health Sector (HS), four from Foreign Affairs Sector (FAS), and three from Non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted exploring the topics of: (1) Health concerns entering diplomatic and foreign policy; (2) Processes that allow actors to influence foreign policy and negotiation and; (3) Impact of multilateral negotiations on decision-making at the national level.

RESULTS

Our analysis suggests that GHD in Mexico is hierarchically driven by the FAS and health concerns only enter foreign policy when they are relevant to national priorities (such as trade or security). HS possesses a lesser degree of influence in GHD, serving as an instance of consultation for the FAS when deciding on health-related issues at global meetings (i.e., World Health Assembly). NGOs resort to lobbying, advocacy, networking, and coalition-working practices with other sectors (academy, think-tanks) to prevent harmful impacts on local health from multilateral decisions and as a mean to compensate its power asymmetry for influencing GHD processes in relation to the government.

CONCLUSIONS

GHD in Mexico occurs in a context of asymmetric power relationships where government actors have the strongest influence. However, NGOs' experience in raising awareness of health risks needs to be weighted by government decision-makers. This situation calls for capacity building on intersectoral communication and coordination to create formal mechanisms of GHD practices, including the professionalization and training on GHD among government agencies.

Why the COVID-19 response needs International Relations

The COVID-19 pandemic affects all countries, but how governments respond is dictated by politics. Amid this, the World Health Organization (WHO) has tried to coordinate advice to states and offer ongoing management of the outbreak. Given the political drivers of COVID-19, we argue this is an important moment to advance International Relations knowledge as a necessary and distinctive method for inclusion in the WHO repertoire of knowledge inputs for epidemic control. Historical efforts to assert technical expertise over politics is redundant and outdated: the WHO has always been politicized by member states. We suggest WHO needs to embrace the politics and engage foreign policy and diplomatic expertise. We suggest practical examples of the entry points where International Relations methods can inform public health decision-making and technical policy coordination. We write this as a primer for those working in response to COVID-19 in WHO, multilateral organizations, donor financing departments, governments and international non-governmental organizations, to embrace political analysis rather than shy away from it. Coordinated political cooperation is vital to overcome COVID-19.

Panama Papers' offshoring network behavior

The present study analyzes the offshoring network constructed from the information contained in the Panama Papers, characterizing worldwide regions and countries as well as their intra- and inter-relationships. The Panama Papers 2016 divulgence is the largest leak of offshoring and tax avoidance documentation. The document leak, with a volume content of approximately 2.6 terabytes, involves more than two hundred thousand enterprises in more than two hundred countries. From this information, the offshore connections of individuals and companies are constructed and aggregated using their countries of origin. The top offshore financial regions and countries of the network are identified, and their intra- and inter-relationship are mapped and described. We are able to identify the top countries in the offshoring network and characterize their connectivity structure, discovering the more prominent actors in the worldwide offshoring scenario and their range of influence.

Reluctance in international politics: A conceptualization

Contemporary rising powers have often pursued a hesitant and ambiguous foreign-policy and have belied the expectations of potential followers and established powers who would want them to engage more actively in global and regional governance. The existing analytical toolbox of International Relations does not offer suitable concepts to make sense of the widespread phenomenon of states that pursue hesitant, inconsistent courses of action and do not bring to bear their power resources to coherently manage international crises that potentially affect them. A notion that is frequently employed to describe this peculiar type of foreign policy is that of 'reluctance', but this concept has not been systematically defined, discussed or theorized. This article aims to introduce the concept of reluctance into the field of International Relations. It develops a conceptualization of reluctance by identifying the concept's semantic field and discussing how reluctance relates to the similar but distinct notions of exceptionalism, isolationism, under-aggression and under-balancing (concept reconstruction); on that basis, the article outlines the constitutive dimensions of reluctance - hesitation and recalcitrance - and their operationalization (concept building). Several illustrative cases of (non-)reluctant rising powers are used to exemplify the concept structure and to show the analytical usefulness of the concept of reluctance, which refers to a distinct set of phenomena that are not addressed by other concepts in International Relations. An application of the concept allows us to identify policy shifts and differences across issue areas, as well as open up avenues for further research.

The 'abnormal' state: Identity, norm/exception and Japan

The term 'abnormal' has frequently been used to describe post-war Japan. Together with the idea that the country will, or should have to, 'normalise' its foreign and security policy, it has been reproduced in both academia and Japanese society. Why is Japan branded as 'abnormal', and from where does the desire to 'normalise' it come? Drawing on a relational concept of identity, and the distinction between norm and exception, this article argues that the 'abnormality-normalisation nexus' can be understood in terms of three identity-producing processes: (1) the process whereby the Japanese Self is socialised in US/'Western' norms, ultimately constructing it as an Other in the international system; (2) the process whereby the Japanese Self imagines itself as 'legitimately exceptional' (what is called 'exceptionalisation'), but also 'illegitimately abnormal' - both of which are epitomised by Japan's 'pacifism'; and (3) the process whereby both the Self's 'negative abnormality' and China/Asia are securitised in attempts to realise a more 'normal' (or super-normal) Japanese Self. How Japan is inter subjectively constructed on a scale between 'normal' and 'abnormal' enables and constrains action. Although Japan has not remilitarised nearly as much in the 2000s as is often claimed, these processes might very well forebode an exceptional decision to become 'normal' and therefore more significant steps towards remilitarisation.

Globalization as a driver or bottleneck for sustainable development: some empirical, cross-national reflections on basic issues of international health policy and management

BACKGROUND

This article looks at the long-term, structural determinants of environmental and public health performance in the world system.

METHODS

In multiple standard ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, we tested the effects of 26 standard predictor variables, including the 'four freedoms' of goods, capital, labour and services, on the following indicators of sustainable development and public health: avoiding net trade of ecological footprint global hectare (gha) per person; avoiding high carbon emissions per million US dollars GDP; avoiding high CO2 per capita (gha/cap); avoiding high ecological footprint per capita; avoiding becoming victim of natural disasters; a good performance on the Environmental Performance Index (EPI); a good performance on the Happy Life Years (HLYs) scale; and a good performance on the Happy Planet Index (HPI).

RESULTS

Our research showed that the apprehensions of quantitative research, critical of neo-liberal globalization, are fully vindicated by the significant negative environmental and public health effects of the foreign savings rate. High foreign savings are indeed a driver of global footprint, and are a blockade against a satisfactory HPI performance. The new international division of labour is one of the prime drivers of high CO2 per capita emissions. Multinational Corporation (MNC) penetration, the master variable of most quantitative dependency theories, blocks EPI and several other socially important processes. Worker remittances have a significant positive effect on the HPI, and HLYs.

CONCLUSION

We re-analysed the solid macro-political and macro-sociological evidence on a global scale, published in the world's leading peer-reviewed social science, ecological and public health journals, which seem to indicate that there are contradictions between unfettered globalization and unconstrained world economic openness and sustainable development and public health development. We suggest that there seems to be a strong interaction between 'transnational capitalist penetration' and 'environmental and public health degradation'. Global policy-making finally should dare to take the globalization-critical organizations of 'civil society' seriously. This conclusion not only holds for the countries of the developed "West", but also, increasingly, for the growing democracy and civil society movements around the globe, in countries as diverse as Brazil, Russia, China, or ever larger parts of the Muslim world.