Informal Groups and International Relations: A Critical Study on Behind-Scene World Politics

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-092-3_76How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Behind-scene politics; informal groups; paternal power; international relations; diplomacy

Abstract

The actual content of political work is the handling of human relationships. As the study of international politics progresses, scholars increasingly feel the incompetence of formal organizations and political procedures in explaining political phenomena, thus shift their focus to informal areas such as political psychology and culture. In this paper, we shall focus on informal groups existed in international politics, distinguish between different structures of informal groups such as “iron triangles” and “political networks,” define the roles they play in international politics, and explore two types of power that come into play when the dynamics of informal groups change. The article will briefly invoke and analyze various political phenomena that have emerged in the history of international relations as a tool for explaining and elaborating its arguments. It is hoped that the study of informal groups will both escape the dilemmas of formal organizational and procedural studies and avoid the isolationist and idealistic tendencies that arise in the study of political culture and psychology, providing a sample for behind-the-scenes studies of international politics.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wenhao Zhang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/09/09
TI  - Informal Groups and International Relations: A Critical Study on Behind-Scene World Politics
BT  - Proceedings of the 2023 9th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 631
EP  - 638
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-092-3_76
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-092-3_76
ID  - Zhang2023
ER  -