Jan Niklas Rolf
Biographic Data
| ID | 2276573 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jan Niklas Rolf |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jan Niklas |
| FAMILY NAME | Rolf |
| SIGNATURE | ROLF J N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0563-1173 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Signalling and Balancing in the Conflict in Ukraine from 2014 to 2016
This paper analyses the conflictual and cooperative signals of two domestic actors – the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian separatists – and two international actors – the European Union and the Russian Federation – during the first three years of the conflict in Ukraine. Previous studies largely treated the actions of domestic actors as a dependent variable and the actions of international actors as an independent variable. Our results demo…
What’s wrong with these pictures? A critique of Waltz, Walt and McFaul
Reflecting on the ideas that have been offered to explain interstate conflict, Kenneth Waltz famously identified three images of war. Waltz’s method to rule out certain causes as the underlying causes of war was to identify constant and variable variables. The fact that the variety in one variable is not matched by the variety in another variable then allowed him to question the assumed causal relationship between the two variables. But whereas i…
Olympism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism
Unity in Diversity’ – this motto of the 2021 Games in Tokyo nicely expresses the tension between universalism and particularism that besets not only the Olympic Games, but almost every aspect of international politics today. Treating the Olympics as a microcosm, this article explores whether the Games are able to overcome that tension. It is argued that their specific symbols, rituals and myths have been hijacked by nationalist ones, to which the…
The first 100 years
This paper argues that peace studies and the Welsh school of critical security studies both define themselves in opposition to the traditional view of security, with the only difference that the former goes through the concept of peace in voicing its critique of security. Pointing to some striking similarities in the epistemology, methodology and ontology of Johan Galtung and Ken Booth, it shows that the two studies have been driving on parallel …
Both/And or Neither/Nor? On the Prospect of “New Cosmopolitanism” to Serve as a Middle Ground between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Over the course of the past three decades, Western politics has gone from one extreme to another. Whereas the immediate post-Cold War years were marked by a cosmopolitan heyday, in recent years we are witnessing a nationalist backlash. Given this heightened political polarization, the quest for a viable middle ground becomes all the more pressing. The unlikely candidate that this article considers is the body of thought that has been termed “new …
Projecting General Assembly Voting Records onto an Enlarged Security Council
The paper examines the distributive and collective effects of the United Nations (UN) reform proposal by the Group of Four (G4) which envisions a 25‐member Security Council with four additional non‐permanent and six additional permanent members. Academic scholars and affected states have argued that adding more (veto) players to the Council would reduce the voting power of the five current permanent members (P5) and undermine the effectiveness of…
Donald Trump’s Jacksonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy
While the presidency of Donald Trump has come to an end, the debate about its theoretical classification is in full swing. Some have argued that Trump’s foreign policy stands in the tradition of Jacksonianism – one of the four schools of thought identified by Walter R. Mead. Others believe Trumpism (or, for that matter, Trumpianism) to constitute a school in its own right. This article suggests that Trump’s foreign policy is both old and new in t…
Rawls’s duty of assistance and relative deprivation
John Rawls’s case for a duty of assistance is partially premised on the assumption that liberal societies have an interest in assisting burdened societies to become well-ordered: Not only are well-ordered peoples inherently peaceful, but negative spillover effects would also disappear where peoples have a just or decent institutional order. Drawing on relative deprivation theory, this article argues that the kind of limited assistance that Rawls …
Special affects? Nationalist and cosmopolitan discourses through the transmission of emotions
The fool and the franchiser
Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls are usually portrayed in antagonistic terms. While Hobbes, one of the first scholars to translate Thucydides, is often held to be an archetypal realist, Rawls, a self-proclaimed follower of Kant, is frequently said to argue from an explicit normative position. In this paper, I try to demonstrate that the two philosophers have more in common than is generally thought. Drawing on Hobbes's answer to the fool and Rawls's …
The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory
Today, the domestic analogy is a well-established and frequently used term in the discipline of International Relations (IR). What is less established is that often two different analogies are hiding behind this term - an analogy between the domestic and the international realm, on the one hand, and an analogy between a state of nature and the international realm, on the other hand. This article argues that only in the former case, we can speak o…
Olympism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism
Unity in Diversity’ – this motto of the 2021 Games in Tokyo nicely expresses the tension between universalism and particularism that besets not only the Olympic Games, but almost every aspect of international politics today. Treating the Olympics as a microcosm, this article explores whether the Games are able to overcome that tension. It is argued that their specific symbols, rituals and myths have been hijacked by nationalist ones, to which the…
Donald Trump’s Jacksonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy
While the presidency of Donald Trump has come to an end, the debate about its theoretical classification is in full swing. Some have argued that Trump’s foreign policy stands in the tradition of Jacksonianism – one of the four schools of thought identified by Walter R. Mead. Others believe Trumpism (or, for that matter, Trumpianism) to constitute a school in its own right. This article suggests that Trump’s foreign policy is both old and new in t…
Both/And or Neither/Nor? On the Prospect of “New Cosmopolitanism” to Serve as a Middle Ground between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Over the course of the past three decades, Western politics has gone from one extreme to another. Whereas the immediate post-Cold War years were marked by a cosmopolitan heyday, in recent years we are witnessing a nationalist backlash. Given this heightened political polarization, the quest for a viable middle ground becomes all the more pressing. The unlikely candidate that this article considers is the body of thought that has been termed “new …
The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory
Today, the domestic analogy is a well-established and frequently used term in the discipline of International Relations (IR). What is less established is that often two different analogies are hiding behind this term - an analogy between the domestic and the international realm, on the one hand, and an analogy between a state of nature and the international realm, on the other hand. This article argues that only in the former case, we can speak o…
The state of nature analogy in International Relations theory
Today, the domestic analogy is a well-established and frequently used term in the discipline of International Relations (IR). What is less established is that often two different analogies are hiding behind this term - an analogy between the domestic and the international realm, on the one hand, and an analogy between a state of nature and the international realm, on the other hand. This article argues that only in the former case, we can speak o…
Special affects? Nationalist and cosmopolitan discourses through the transmission of emotions
The fool and the franchiser
Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls are usually portrayed in antagonistic terms. While Hobbes, one of the first scholars to translate Thucydides, is often held to be an archetypal realist, Rawls, a self-proclaimed follower of Kant, is frequently said to argue from an explicit normative position. In this paper, I try to demonstrate that the two philosophers have more in common than is generally thought. Drawing on Hobbes's answer to the fool and Rawls's …
Rawls’s duty of assistance and relative deprivation
John Rawls’s case for a duty of assistance is partially premised on the assumption that liberal societies have an interest in assisting burdened societies to become well-ordered: Not only are well-ordered peoples inherently peaceful, but negative spillover effects would also disappear where peoples have a just or decent institutional order. Drawing on relative deprivation theory, this article argues that the kind of limited assistance that Rawls …
Projecting General Assembly Voting Records onto an Enlarged Security Council
The paper examines the distributive and collective effects of the United Nations (UN) reform proposal by the Group of Four (G4) which envisions a 25‐member Security Council with four additional non‐permanent and six additional permanent members. Academic scholars and affected states have argued that adding more (veto) players to the Council would reduce the voting power of the five current permanent members (P5) and undermine the effectiveness of…
Donald Trump’s Jacksonian and Jeffersonian foreign policy
While the presidency of Donald Trump has come to an end, the debate about its theoretical classification is in full swing. Some have argued that Trump’s foreign policy stands in the tradition of Jacksonianism – one of the four schools of thought identified by Walter R. Mead. Others believe Trumpism (or, for that matter, Trumpianism) to constitute a school in its own right. This article suggests that Trump’s foreign policy is both old and new in t…
The first 100 years
This paper argues that peace studies and the Welsh school of critical security studies both define themselves in opposition to the traditional view of security, with the only difference that the former goes through the concept of peace in voicing its critique of security. Pointing to some striking similarities in the epistemology, methodology and ontology of Johan Galtung and Ken Booth, it shows that the two studies have been driving on parallel …
Both/And or Neither/Nor? On the Prospect of “New Cosmopolitanism” to Serve as a Middle Ground between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Over the course of the past three decades, Western politics has gone from one extreme to another. Whereas the immediate post-Cold War years were marked by a cosmopolitan heyday, in recent years we are witnessing a nationalist backlash. Given this heightened political polarization, the quest for a viable middle ground becomes all the more pressing. The unlikely candidate that this article considers is the body of thought that has been termed “new …
Olympism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism
Unity in Diversity’ – this motto of the 2021 Games in Tokyo nicely expresses the tension between universalism and particularism that besets not only the Olympic Games, but almost every aspect of international politics today. Treating the Olympics as a microcosm, this article explores whether the Games are able to overcome that tension. It is argued that their specific symbols, rituals and myths have been hijacked by nationalist ones, to which the…
What’s wrong with these pictures? A critique of Waltz, Walt and McFaul
Reflecting on the ideas that have been offered to explain interstate conflict, Kenneth Waltz famously identified three images of war. Waltz’s method to rule out certain causes as the underlying causes of war was to identify constant and variable variables. The fact that the variety in one variable is not matched by the variety in another variable then allowed him to question the assumed causal relationship between the two variables. But whereas i…
Signalling and Balancing in the Conflict in Ukraine from 2014 to 2016
This paper analyses the conflictual and cooperative signals of two domestic actors – the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian separatists – and two international actors – the European Union and the Russian Federation – during the first three years of the conflict in Ukraine. Previous studies largely treated the actions of domestic actors as a dependent variable and the actions of international actors as an independent variable. Our results demo…
Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Cosmopolitanism (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (3 works)