Abstract
Human needs approaches to the study of international relations rest on the basic assumption that human needs are a key motivational force behind human behavior and social interaction. According to this perspective, there exist specific and relatively enduring human needs which individuals will inevitably strive to satisfy, even at the cost of personal disorientation and social disruption. As human needs theorists point out, there is empirical support for this assumption in a developed body of literature in the social sciences, both experimental and documentary, which demonstrates clearly that individuals have fundamental human needs such that if they are deprived of those needs, especially in the early years of development, they will suffer physically and psychologically.
A modified form of a chapter in R. A. Coate and J. A. Rosati (eds), The Power of Human Needs in World Society (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
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Notes and References
Roger A. Coate and Jerel A. Rosati (eds), The Power of Human Needs in World Society (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
In political theory, see David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987);
Ross Fitzgerald (ed.), Human Needs and Politics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977);
Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (London: Hogarth Press, 1984);
Alkis Kontos, “Through a Glass Darkly: Ontology and False Needs,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3 (Winter 1979): 25–45;
and Patricia Springborg, The Problem of Human Nature and the Critique of Civilization (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981).
In development, see Johan Galtung, “The New International Economic Order and the Basic Needs Approach,” Alternatives 4 (1978–79): 455–76;
Katrin Lederer (ed.), with Johan Galtung and David Antar, Human Needs (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980);
Han S. Park, Needs and Political Development (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1984);
and United Nations University, Human Development in Micro to Macro Perspective (November 1982).
See, for example, Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978),
and Raymond Aron, War and Peace: A Theory of International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1966).
See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (London: Addison-Wesley, 1979);
Robert Gilpin, War abnd Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
and Stephen Krasner, Cultural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Perhaps, a part of this rigidity can even be traced, as Ashley suggests, to the desire of some analysts of international relations to serve as advisors to state elites who are mainly concerned with maintaining the status quo. Richard K. Ashley, “Three Modes of Economism,” International Studies Quarterly, 27 (4) (December, 1988): 463–96.
John Burton, Deviance, Terrorism and War: The Process of Solving Unsolved Social and Political Problems (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979).
See Lederer, “Introduction,” in Lederer (ed.), Human Needs: 1–14 for a discussion of this issue.
See Ramashray Roy, “Human Needs and Freedom: Three Contrasting Perceptions and Perspectives,” Alternatives 5 (1979–80): 195–212.
James Chowning Davies, Human Nature in Politics: The Dynamics of Political Behavior (London: John Wiley, 1963)
and “The Priority of Human Needs and the Stages of Political Development,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, (eds), Human Nature in Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1977): 157–195; and Galtung, “The New International Economic Order.”
Christian Bay, “Self-Respect as a Human Right: Thoughts on the Dialectics of Wants and Needs in the Struggle for Human Community,” Human Rights Quarterly (1982): 53–75.
For discussions on need “satisfiers,” see Johan Galtung, “The New International Economic Order”: 55–126, and Lederer, “Introduction”: 3.
Davies, “The Priority of Human Needs.”
Burton, Deviance, Terrorism, and War.
Galtung, “The New International Economic Order.”
Edward E. Azar and John Burton (eds), International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (Brighton, England: Wheatsheaf; Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1986).
Paul Sites, Control: The Basis of Social Order (New York: Dunellen, 1973): 15, and Burton, Deviance, Terrorism and War: 64–5.
Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review, 65 (1971): 991–1017.
Ashley, “Three Modes of Economism.”
E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (New York: Harper & Row, 1939),
and Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
See R. A. Coate and J. A. Rosati, “Human Needs in World Society,” in Coate and Rosati (eds), The Power of Human Needs in World Society: 1–20.
Quincy Wright, The Study of International Relations (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955).
James N. Rosenau, “A Pre-Theory Revisited: World Politics in an Era of Cascading Interdependence,” International Studies Quarterly, 28 (September 1984): 269.
Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis.
Richard W. Mansbach and John A. Vasquez, In Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981);
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1977),
Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984);
Johan Galtung, The True Worlds: A Transnational Perspective (New York: The Free Press, 1979),
Saul Mendlovitz, “On the Creation of a Just World Order: An Agenda for a Program of Inquiry and Praxis,” Alternatives, 7 (Winter 1981): 355–73,
and Richard A. Falk, et al. (eds), Studies on a Just World Order (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982).
See Hayward Alker and Thomas Biersteker, “The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archaeologist of International Savoir Faire,” International Studies Quarterly, 28 (2) (1984): 121–42.
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Rosati, J.A., Carroll, D.J., Coate, R.A. (1990). A Critical Assessment of the Power of Human Needs in World Society. In: Burton, J., Dukes, F. (eds) Conflict: Readings in Management and Resolution. The Conflict Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21003-9_9
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