Why is there no reactionary international theory? International relations has long drawn on a range of traditions in political thought. However, no current, or even recent, major school of ...international-relations theory embraces reactionary doctrine. This is more surprising than some might assume. Reaction was once common in the field and is now increasingly common in world politics. In this note, we define reaction and show that no active and influential school of international-relations theory falls within its ideological domain. Nonetheless, reactionary ideas once deeply shaped the field. We identify two distinct kinds of reactionary international politics and illustrate them empirically. We argue that the current lack of reactionary international relations undermines the field’s ability to make sense both of its own history and of reactionary practice. Finally, we offer some preliminary thoughts about why reactionary ideas hold little sway in contemporary international-relations theory.
In this theory note, I address two new approaches in international relations theory gaining adherents and producing insightful applications: practice theory and relationalism. Practice theory draws ...attention to everyday logics in world politics.It stresses how international actors are driven less by abstract notions of the national interest, identities, or preferences than by context-dependent practical imperatives. Relationalism rejects the idea that entities—like states and international organizations—are the basic units of world politics. It replaces them with a focus on ongoing processes. Noting similarities in their arguments to those advanced by early constructivists, I argue that, taken together, practice theory and relationalism represent the New Constructivism in International Relations (IR). A practice-relational turn became necessary because the meaning of constructivism narrowed over time, becoming tied to a specific scientific ontology focusing on the role of identity, norms, and culture in world politics. This ontology unduly narrowed constructivism's theoretical lenses, which practice theory and relationalism productively reopen.
We examine feminism in international relations from the emergence of women’s peace pragmatism during WWI to the development of the United Nations (UN) Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda a ...century later. We argue that feminism did not come late to international relations. Rather, international relations came late to feminism. Moreover, we show how the principles articulated by women peace activists at the 1915 Hague Conference represent distinct contributions to the discipline. These principles reflect a pragmatic approach derived from women’s experiences of promoting peace and inclusion. The pragmatism of these principles is echoed by, and further developed in, four pillars of the WPS agenda—as shaped by advocates of women’s rights, working through processes of trial and error, to gain state support for advance principles of equal and lasting peace. States may have rejected discussion of women’s rights as an appropriate matter for international negotiations in 1915. But with the evolution of women’s political rights during the twentieth century, it is now possible to advance a feminist perspective on international peace and security. By recovering neglected aspects of the last century of international relations’ feminism, this article helps further an alternative, pragmatist perspective on ways of knowing and doing international relations.
This book is an open access book. Many scholars have wondered if a non-Western theory of international politics founded on different premises, be it from Asia or from the “Global South,” could ...release international relations from the grip of a Western, “Westphalian” model. This book argues that a Buddhist approach to international relations could provide a genuine alternative. Because of its distinctive philosophical positions and its unique understanding of reality, human nature and political behavior, a Buddhist theory of IR offers a way out of this dilemma, a means for transcending the Westphalian predicament. The author explains this Buddhist IR model, beginning with its philosophical foundations up through its ideas about politics, economics and statecraft.
The discipline of International Relations (IR) does not reflect the voices, experiences, knowledge claims, and contributions of the vast majority of the societies and states in the world, and often ...marginalizes those outside the core countries of the West. With IR scholars around the world seeking to find their own voices and reexamining their own traditions, our challenge now is to chart a course toward a truly inclusive discipline, recognizing its multiple and diverse foundations. This article presents the notion of a "Global IR" that transcends the divide between the West and the Rest. The first part of the article outlines six main dimensions of Global IR: commitment to pluralistic universalism, grounding in world history, redefining existing IR theories and methods and building new ones from societies hitherto ignored as sources of IR knowledge, integrating the study of regions and regionalisms into the central concerns of IR, avoiding ethnocentrism and exceptionalism irrespective of source and form, and recognizing a broader conception of agency with material and ideational elements that includes resistance, normative action, and local constructions of global order. It then outlines an agenda for research that supports the Global IR idea. Key element of the agenda includes comparative studies of international systems that look past and beyond the Westphalian form, conceptualizing the nature and characteristics of a post-Western world order that might be termed as a Multiplex World, expanding the study of regionalisms and regional orders beyond Eurocentric models, building synergy between disciplinary and area studies approaches, expanding our investigations into the two-way diffusion of ideas and norms, and investigating the multiple and diverse ways in which civilizations encounter each other, which includes peaceful interactions and mutual learning. The challenge of building a Global IR does not mean a one-size-fits-all approach; rather, it compels us to recognize the diversity that exists in our world, seek common ground, and resolve conflicts.
This article revisits the debate on the role of ethnography in International Relations. It primarily does this by elucidating three points of tension in the literature on ethnography in International ...Relations. Firstly, it tackles the challenges related to ‘getting on’ with ethnography after the reflexive methodological developments that have taken place within anthropology since the 1980s. Secondly, it investigates how to overcome certain matters of scale and how to conceptualise the ‘international’ methodologically, or more specifically, ethnographically. When looking at issues that somehow exist and operate on the international scale, the ethnographic task of immersion in local scenes does sometimes seem like an ill-suited approach. However, I argue, this problematisation is dependent on a certain methodological understanding of what the international is. I attempt to formulate an alternative methodological approach that takes seriously the idea that international relations always can be accessed locally. This paper suggests that one of the main solutions to the obstacle of scale is methodologically abandon the imaginary of totalities as a higher level. In this way, ethnography can enable important understandings of social relations that exist across scales of local and global.
Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political ...manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
Abstract
Unmaking, deconstruction, and destruction are part of the everyday life of politics. This article makes an initial case for the plausibility of the argument that International Relations (IR) ...should expand its gaze and scholarly practice not only into material-aesthetic making, as suggested by the International Political Design (IPD) project, but also into material-aesthetic unmaking and destruction. If making is thinking, as Austin and Leander (2021) suggest, unmaking is also a scholarly enterprise, one that might be as intellectually significant as making, and have important implications for the project specifically and IR scholarship more generally. While I am not arguing that unmaking or destruction is always or even usually normatively good, I am arguing that it is intellectually important to understand and engage, and that thinking about unmaking has important normative implications for making. The first section of this article introduces the IPD project, and suggests that it is operationally and necessarily positive in its current instantiations, despite its criticality. The second section, drawing on inspirations as divergent as queer theory and realist IR, sets out an onto-epistemologically negative approach to IR/the world and uses that approach to problematize the positivity of the IPD project. The following three sections engage with potential negative approaches to making-as-scholarship: negative design, deconstruction, and destruction, engaging with the potential implications for both disciplinary inquiry in IR and the practices of IR scholars in the “world” as such. A conclusion talks about the importance of including deconstruction, demolition, destruction, tearing down, and unmaking in IR scholarship.
Abstract
Controversy has surrounded realist explanations of the causes of Russia's war against Ukraine, particularly John Mearsheimer's charge of western responsibility. This article seeks to clarify ...and contextualize his argument, situating it within the broader paradigm. Realism, and even its narrower offensive sub-school, offers a wide range of contrasting interpretations, depending on which major actors are studied and what characteristics they are endowed with. Like its classical predecessor, structural realism is premised on implicit views of human nature. In an effort to explicate some of these assumptions about the behavioural micro-foundations of states and their leaders, the article investigates main components of structural theory—including power differentials, ‘rational’ interests and states as unitary actors—and connects these concepts to base emotions like fear and anger. It argues that realists do well to differentiate between the aspirations of states and individual leaders' quest for power and status. In the same vein, reference to Russian security concerns may be emblematic of elites' perceived challenges of cultural subordination, and Putin's personal fears for the stability of his regime. Engagement with realist thought is essential, in part because of its continuing influence on policy-making (particularly in Russia) and in order to forestall improper co-option of caricaturized versions of realist arguments.
International Relations at the End Kristensen, Peter Marcus
International studies quarterly,
06/2018, Letnik:
62, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Recent interventions suggest that the discipline of international relations has moved beyond “grand theories” and “great debates” toward middle range theorizing and quantitative hypothesis testing. ...At the same time, scholars argue that the field is fragmenting into insular camps. I subject these claims to an analysis that borrows from scholarship on the sociology of science. I apply network analytical methods to dissect the structure of the discipline: its dominant camps, the relationship among them, and their relative role in the discipline. I identify several citation camps, primarily delineated by theory, but also methods and subfields. The realist, liberal institutionalist, and constructivist camps continue to occupy a central role in the field. All three “isms” are identifiable as separate communities. But they are also more closely intertwined and cross-contaminated than the fragmentation thesis suggests. At the margins of the isms, connecting via constructivism, we find three theoretical camps: post-structuralism, English School, and neo-Marxist critical theory. Separate from the theoretical region, we find two camps of formal modeling, methods, and quantitative studies of inter-and intra-state conflict. The most-cited works in the field include both those engaged in grand theorization and quantitative hypothesis testing, but it is still the theoretical camps, the three isms in particular, that give international relations its distinctive sociological structure.
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