(Ebook) Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power by Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Clark, Robyn Eckersley, Richard Price, Christian Reus-Smit, Nicholas J. Wheeler ISBN 9781107691698, 1107691699

(Ebook) Special Responsibilities: Global Problems and American Power by Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Clark, Robyn Eckersley, Richard Price, Christian Reus-Smit, Nicholas J. Wheeler ISBN 9781107691698, 1107691699

This book uses the concept of special responsibilities to analyze the social nature of American power and problem-solving capacity. Special Responsibilities explores how leaders, scholars, and competing theoretical approaches have understood the special role that great powers play in international politics. Purely power-based accounts cannot fully explain either why certain states take on special responsibilities, or why other states accept them in that role. Although capabilities are important, they do not override social power in specific policy domains. Instead, only a country's willingness to exercise certain special responsibilities, and the acceptance of that role by others, can translate raw capabilities into meaningful social power. Power is contingent on social acceptance and varies from one issue area to another. Thus, international cooperation is most likely when the system's most powerful actors recognize that providing collective goods is in their own narrow self-interest.