Argument und Struktur

Argument

Elemente eines Arguments

Beispiel 1 eines Arguments

“Maghrebi dissatisfaction with political and economic development has serious implications for Europe. North Africa becomes a ‘producer [and exporter] of terrorists’ (Alonso and Garcıa Rey 2007, p. 579). These movements and organisations also converge on aims and strategies of the global Salafi jihad that treats Europe as a source and accomplice in this political suppression and economic stagnation (Githens-Mazer 2008, p. 1026).” (Eder 2011, 438)

Beispiel 2 eines Arguments

“The Iraq War has been one of the most significant events in world politics since the end of the Cold War. One of the first preventive wars in history, it cost trillions of dollars, resulted in more than 4,500 U.S. and coalition casualties (to date), caused enormous suffering in Iraq, and may have spurred greater anti-Americanism in the Middle East even while reducing potential threats to the United States and its allies. Yet, despite its profound importance, the causes of the war have received little sustained analysis from scholars of international relations.¹” (Lake 2010/2011, 7)

¹ Positive theories of the Iraq War are few. See Daniel Byman, “An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Failure or Bridge Too Far?” Security Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (October 2008), pp. 599–643; Andrew Flibbert, “The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War,” Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April–June 2006), pp. 310–352…

Absatz

Beispiel eines Absatzes (Tannenwald 1999, 433–34)

This investigation is motivated by several empirical anomalies in the conventional account—deterrence—of the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945. First is the non-use of nuclear weapons in cases where there was no fear of nuclear retaliation, that is, where the adversary could not retaliate in kind. This anomaly includes the first ten years or so of the nuclear era, when the United States possessed first an absolute nuclear monopoly and then an overwhelming nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union. It also includes non-use by the United States in Vietnam (where the United States dropped tonnage equivalent to dozens of Hiroshima bombs) and in the 1991 Persian weapons in the Falklands, nor for why the Soviet Union did not resort to nuclear weapons to avoid defeat in Afghanistan.

A second anomaly emerges when we turn the question around and ask why nuclear weapons, supposedly fearsome deterrent weapons, have not deterred attacks by non-nuclear states against nuclear states. China attacked U.S. forces in the Korean War, North Vietnam attacked U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, Argentina attacked Britain in the Falklands in 1982, and Iraq attacked U.S. forces and Israel in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Knowledge of a widespread normative opprobrium against nuclear use may have strengthened expectations of non-nuclear states that nuclear weapons would not be used against them. A third anomaly is that, as Harald Müller has pointed out, the security situation of small, non-nuclear states has not been rendered as perilous in the nuclear age as a realist picture of a predatory anarchy would predict, even though they are completely defenseless against nuclear attack and could not retaliate in kind.² Most non-nuclear states do not live daily in a nuclear security dilemma. Finally, if deterrence is all that matters, then why have so many states not developed nuclear weapons when they could have done so? Realist arguments that U.S. security guarantees extend the U.S. nuclear umbrella to these non-nuclear states are inadequate, since some of these non-nuclear (but nuclear-capable) states lack U.S. guarantees.³

Struktur

Abbildung 2: J.K. Rowlings Storyboard für “Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix” Romane (Quelle: Daily Mail)

Storyboard

Outline