Academic Discipline Of International Relations Research Articles

The Evolution of International Relations Scholarship and its Praxis in Sri Lanka: A Review of Historical Evidence

101 years have passed since the birth of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) at the University College Wales, Aberystwyth in 1919. After approximately 60 years, the discipline was introduced to the academic realms of Sri Lanka, by appointing Dr. Shelton U. Kodikara as the first professor in IR at the University of Colombo. However, Sri Lanka’s praxis of international relations dates back to the pre-colonial times. Arguably, as much historical evidence attests, the praxis of international relations during the early-independence period was materialized in a void of academic expertise. Given this backdrop, the present study reviews the prevailing literature (including primary and secondary historical evidence) on the inception and growth of International Relations as a specific academic discipline of its own identity in Sri Lanka. Below, the authors briefly examine the historical praxis of IR in Sri Lanka, establishment of the discipline in the public university system, including the establishment of the Department of International Relations at the University of Colombo. The status of teaching IR at local universities and the future directions of the discipline receive special attention for the above discussion. The growth of national think tanks focusing on different aspects of the discipline is understood as a positive sign. In addition, the authors also focus on the constructive role played by Ministry of Foreign Relations underpinning the discipline. The study concludes with several suggestions to bridge the gap between the academia and the practitioners of international relations of Sri Lanka.

European Union-Middle East Relations and International Relations Theory: A Stock-Taking and Suggestions for Research

Current scholarship on European Union-Middle East relations has contributed little to ongoing theoretical debates in the academic discipline of international relations. Yet several influential research programmes regarding world politics would benefit from incorporating events and trends involving these two regions. In particular, conceptual controversies regarding regional and global security, the diffusion of regional identities, interregionalism and overlapping regionalism and the politics of empire will be advanced when specialists concentrate on analytical puzzles, and move beyond descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive accounts. Security, interregionalism, overlapping regionalism, empire, European Union

International Relations: The Story So Far

‘The Story So Far’ is the conclusion of the first centenary Special Issue of the journal International Relations. The issue marks 100 years since the birth of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR), whose institutional moment was the endowment establishing the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, at the end of 1918, and its subsequent opening in April 1919. The collection of articles marking this unique event consists of reflections by a group of leading scholars on themes of continuity and change at the international level of world politics in that century. The present article considers these reflections in the context of problematising our attempts to understand the long history and complex dynamics of international relations.

Farewell to Anarchy: The Myth of International Anarchy and Birth of Anarcophilia in International Relations

This article scrutinizes the conceptual history of international anarchy. The argument purported here is that even though the idea of international anarchy is often seen as very central for the academic discipline of international relations, the concept is in fact not found from the forerunners or classics of the discipline. The assumption of international anarchy is commonly seen as a defining feature of a Realist school of international relations. Yet, the concept and especially its “Realist” implications are not to be found in the classics of Realism, from Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes. The idea of “international anarchy” emerges quite tentatively during the First World War, in the writings of theoreticians like Dickinson and Spiller. But even then it does not carry the neo-Realist overtones of international anarchy as permanent condition of international relations. It is only in the 1980’s that the discipline starts to huddle around this concept.

Rethinking agency in International Relations: performativity, performances and actor-networks

The academic discipline of International Relations (IR) has long pondered the questions of what it means to act in international politics and who can do so. However, the particular way in which IR has approached the problem of agency has somewhat masked important dynamics in international politics. By approaching the question of agency as an analytical problem that needs to be resolved before engaging with empirical material, IR has failed to see that who can act is often uncertain and contested. This special issue examines the emergence of international agency as an empirical phenomenon. Rather than analysing what given agents do, the contributions study how practices, performances and networks create and transform agency. In this introductory article, we prepare the ground for this distinct approach to studying international politics. We review how IR has addressed the problem of agency, and we discuss three social–theoretical traditions that see agency as an emergent phenomenon: poststructuralism, performance studies and actor-network theory. Finally, we highlight four insights that emerge from the contributions and challenge how IR has traditionally imagined agency.

Representation and agency in diplomacy: how Kosovo came to agree to the Rambouillet accords

This article traces how Kosovo came to agree to the Rambouillet accords, with the aim of exploring the nexus between diplomatic representation and international agency. It demonstrates that, in the world of diplomacy, entities like ‘Kosovo’ can act only when they are carefully staged. Thus far, however, the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) has largely failed to acknowledge the role of diplomacy in the constitution of agency. Therefore, to clarify what is at stake in the theoretical debate, I begin with a systematic discussion of how IR has conceived of diplomatic representation. Taking cue from Bruno Latour’s and Lisa Disch’s writings on political representation, I then suggest an alternative understanding of diplomacy that takes its performative character seriously. Equipped with this conceptual toolkit, I subsequently turn to the story of Kosovo’s representation at the Rambouillet conference held in 1999. Tracing how Kosovo Albanians and their international supporters staged Kosovo’s diplomatic performance, and how the Yugoslav/Serbian delegation tried to undermine it, I demonstrate that diplomatic representation can indeed generate agency. I also identify three factors that influence whether or not a diplomatic performance succeeds in making those who are represented act: recognition by other international actors, practical competence, and the alignment of the represented.

The Glocal HIV/AIDS Epidemic and the Need for an Extended Theory of Power in International Relations

This paper argues for an extended theory of power in International Relations (IR), using the example of the glocal HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will argue that world power relations depend not only on military, economic, social and cultural power, but also on the power of the human body itself. This argument builds on the author’s own theory of glocalised world power, which combines a Foucaultian with a structurationist approach to argue for the existence of four-faced power relationships across the following twelve interdependent sites of power: 1) time; 2) space; 3) knowledge and aesthetics; 4) morality and emotion; 5) identities; 6) the body; 7) welfare; 8) culture/cultural life; 9) civic associations; 10) the economy; 11) the organisation of violence and coercive relations; and 12) regulatory and legal institutions. Due to the interdependency of all of these sites, it is argued that HIV/AIDS not only has a detrimental effect on the power of the human body, but also on the power of human agency in all of the other sites, thereby constituting an important but often ignored power relationship both within world politics as well as within the academic discipline of IR itself.

Differentiation theory and the ontologies of regionalism in Latin America

Abstract In this article, we argue that conventional understandings of regional integration based on neo-functionalism, hitherto often used to describe the diverse projects of Latin American regionalism, are of limited utility in that context. Rather than representing processes of economic or political unification, the various regionalisms could be understood more productively as a reaction to the crisis in legitimacy that social orders in the region have experienced under the conditions of globalized modernity. We then deploy an understanding of regionalism derived from sociological differentiation theory in order to advance this argument.Keywords: Differentiation Theory; Regional Integration; International Relations Theory; Latin America; Regionalism; World Society. Received: December 13, 2016 Accepted: April 27, 2017 Introduction T he processes collectively identified as Latin American regionalism are, in the academic discipline of International Relations as well as in political and media discourse, generally described using the terminology of regional integration based implicitly or explicitly on neo-functionalism. This application of a theory originally devised to explain the establishment and expansion of supranational political structures in a European context to a geographic area with very different conditions has been problematized before in the literature (Malamud 2010). Yet, what is lacking so far is a convincing theoretical alternative able to describe Latin American regionalism on its own terms. In order to arrive at such a description, we first retrace the debates surrounding contemporary regionalist projects. We come to the conclusion that the actually interesting puzzle is not so much the question of why those projects are behind the European Union in terms of supranationalism and institutionalization, as this can be easily

The Rubik’s cube of postcolonialism: Theory's syncretism and challenges in postcolonial studies

The paper examines the genesis of postcolonialism in various (mutually conditioned) forms: at the conceptual, humanistic, theoretical and disciplinary level. With the contextualization of the work of the first authors who put the question mark on the established and dominant western-centric perception of global divisions, we will (de)construct various historical and paradigmatic influences on the development of postcolonialism. A special emphasis is put on the position of postcolonialism within the so-called Great Debates in the academic discipline of International Relations. Also, we consider the possibility of development of postcolonialism as a theory on the medium level that has a multiple utility for International Relations. A critical examination of the initial assumptions of postcolonialism as inherently processual, reflexive and subversive, will open up the issues of the contemporary challenges of the social life of former colonies and their relationships with other actors on the international scene. One of the major issues (which can be set as a hypothesis) is how to use the advantage of the epistemological and theoretical postulates of postcolonialism in the research of the modern world in which the orientalist rhetoric largely survives, but due to the rise of terrorism and large-scale migration from the Middle East, the political and social reality is changed?

The Ambivalent Relationship of Japan's Soft Power Diplomacy andPrincess Mononoke: Tosaka Jun's philosophy of culture as moral reflection

AbstractCulture is a demanding word, particularly when it is used in the context of the contemporary academic discipline of international relations (IR). It is often employed in order to distinguish one identity from another, allegedly illuminating idiosyncrasies embedded in a particular society or group of people. The essentialized understanding of culture is also detectable in the case of the current debate on the non-Western international relations theories (IRT). Non-Western politicians and scholars often employ the term culture in order to distinguish their values from alleged Western values. However, culture has another important function mainly advanced by a left-wing Kyoto School philosopher Tosaka Jun, that is, culture as a mirror for critical reflection for morality (Tosaka, 1966). This article is based on Tosaka's argument that culture has an important function for moral reflection beyond that of a mere means to identify one's distinctiveness from the West, and it criticizes Japan's soft power diplomacy or the total absence of it from that point of view. It also argues that this absence is the result of the soft power discourse's over-simplified interpretation of culture that results in confrontation between the West and the rest, particularly when it is employed in non-Western IRT discourses. Towards the end, I examine Miyazaki Hayao's films,Princes Mononokein particular, as examples of cultural works facilitating a moment of critical reflection, and I extract embedded messages of relevance to critical reflection on contemporary IR literature, particularly non-Western literature.

Cosmopolitanism and the End of Humanity: A Grammatical Reading of Posthumanism

The academic discipline of International Relations has yet to systematically begin tracing the impact of posthumanism on ethics in global politics. In a context where a humanist picture of the subject is in “a state of crisis that is more acute than ever,” and the “end of humanity” is being declared by some, the question arises as to whether a moral commitment to liberal cosmopolitanism can be maintained. It arises because the moral commitments of cosmopolitanism traditionally rest on a humanist foundation, and posthumanism, at first glance, seems an obvious threat to it. In this article, rather than reading posthumanism as a threat to humanity, I read humanism as the threat. I propose that, tricky though it may be, a cosmopolitanism that embraces the end of humanity can be formulated and defended as a moral commitment to humanity: a cosmopolitanism without foundations. This cosmopolitanism without foundations is, I suggest, one way to overcome the skeptic's fantasy that we are hidden from each other, and with it the belief that our primary relation to the world is one of knowledge anchored to foundational promises of certainty. Instead, a life lived in the world with others is proposed, and with it a cosmopolitan commitment to humanity as an unavoidable ethical responsibility.

The Promises, Problems, and Potentials of a Bourdieu-Inspired Staging of International Relations1

The promise of Bourdieu-inspired analysts to provide a “different reading” of the international is receiving increasing attention in the academic discipline of international relations (IR). This attention also generates awareness and of problems inherent in the Bourdieuian approach and a desire to develop it further (or abandon it). These discussions have often focused on the difficulties that arise for IR as a consequence of the structuralism of Bourdieu's approach, and as such they dovetail with the discussions between Bourdieu's “critical sociology” and the “pragmatic school” in the French context. This article uses these discussions to clarify what it entails to paint a different picture—my picture—of the international using Bourdieu's thinking tools. More specifically, it argues that Bourdieu's thinking can be used as a basis for a non-structuralist staging of the international taking on board the critique raised by pragmatists and integrating many of the insights developed by them. Bourdieu often referred to his own thinking as a “structuralist constructivism,” so this article takes Bourdieu's thinking in a direction he may not have liked to go. However, it sticks closely to the spirit of his contention that one should never privilege scholastic theorizing for the sake of theorizing nor hesitate to “read a thinker against himself.”

Divided Discipline?

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes text stops here in original.)The centre of gravity for the academic discipline of relations is located in the United States, but Canada boasts a vibrant academic community of relations scholars.' Through their teaching, research, and consultations with policymakers, Canadian IR scholars influence how Canadian citizens and policymakers think about world politics, and sometimes directly affect the practice of Canadian foreign policy itself. federal Liberal party's recent leadership race came down to a choice between two former academics: Michael Ignatieff and Stephane Dion. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is associated with the so-called Calgary school of conservative scholars in the University of Calgary's political science department/ However, the views of Canadian IR scholars and their influence on public opinion and foreign policy have not been a subject of systematic study.This article reports results from a survey of IR faculty at Canadian universities conducted in 2006.' survey extends a study of US college and university IR professors originally conducted by scholars at the College of William and Mary in 2004 and repeated in 2oo6.4 biennial teaching, research, and politics (TRIP) survey consists of questions in four parts, dealing with teaching practice and curricula, the academic discipline of relations, issues related to research-including theoretical perspectives employed, methodologies, and topics studied-and views on current and historical policy issues/ 2004 survey organizers attempted to contact every instructor teaching IR courses at the university level in the United States. In 2006 the survey was repeated in the US and extended to Canada.6 2006 US survey received responses from 1,112 ascholars. Canadian survey was completed by no of 275 scholars contacted at Canadian universities.7 smaller size of the Canadian survey makes its findings subject to greater uncertainty. Nonetheless, it offers the most comprehensive overview of the field of Canadian IR. survey paints a portrait of a vital intellectual community of Canadian IR scholars that is simultaneously distinct from, and heavily influenced by, its US counterpart. At the same time, the Canadian academic community is more closely aligned with and influenced by its European and particularly British colleagues in terms of theory, methodology, and epistemology.INSIDE THE IVORY TOWER: THE VIEW FROM CANADADescribing the results of the 2004 US survey in Foreign Policy, Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak noted, The relations field today is surprisingly young. Half of the professors who teach at US colleges today received their PhDs in the past 12 years.* A similar pattern holds for Canadian IR instructors in the 2006 survey. median year for completion of the doctorate was 1995, and the average age was 44. Respondents were evenly distributed across academic ranks, with 30 percent each at the assistant and full professor levels, and 29 percent at the associate level. Nearly all the rest held positions as lecturers or instructors, with one percent each reporting positions as emeritus faculty and other. Canadian IR, like its US cousin, is dominated by men, with women accounting for only 26 percent of respondents.Some interesting differences emerge in the portrait of the two IR communities. Canadian IR, for instance, appears to be more international than American IR. Thirty-six percent of instructors at Canadian universities were born outside of Canada, while only 15 percent of US respondents indicated a country of origin outside the United States. Forty-six percent of Canadian faculty received their PhDs outside of Canada, while only four percent of Americans received their degrees outside the United States. A third of the Canadian respondents reported receiving their PhDs from one of four institutions: York University, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and Carleton University. …

Right and Wrong in Foreign Policy 40 Years On

In 1965, James G. Eayrs was asked to give the Alan B. Plaunt memorial lectures.1 lectures had been inaugurated in 1958, and were intended to focus on broad issues in Canadian political life. Eayrs would have been a logical person to invite to give the 1965 lectures. A well-known academic in the department of political economy at the University of Toronto, he had published a number of works on Canadian foreign policy, including a volume in the Canada in World Affairs series published by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, and Art of the Possible, a pioneering exploration of the foreign policymaking process in Canada.2 Since 1959 he had been the co-editor of the International Journal. He was also well-known outside the university as an accomplished essayist whose commentaries on world affairs appeared in the popular press and were heard on CBC radio. Perhaps most importantly, in 1965 he had just won the governor general's literary award for non-fiction for In Defence of Canada: From the Great War to the Great Depression, a work that turned out to be the first volume of magisterial five-volume exploration of Canadian defence policy in the 20th century.1The two lectures were delivered at Carleton University in November 1965, and were published in 1966 as a slim 57-page volume-Right and Wrong in Foreign Policy.* As the title he selected suggests, Eayrs took the opportunity to explore the question of morality in world politics, particularly in contemporary statecraft.The first lecture, The ways of statecraft, began by reminding us of the widespread deception, treachery, and cruelty that is so much a mark of contemporary foreign policy. Eayrs provided a quick cook's tour of some of the most egregious examples of these essential characteristics of foreign policy, ending with a discussion of the cruelty-and immorality-of using the threat of the destructive power of nuclear weapons as a means of advancing national interests. lecture concluded by looking at different ways of treating morality in statecraft.The second lecture, The ways of keeping faith, was a discussion of the difficulties faced by those who seek to be moral in world politics, and looking at how to the practitioners of statecraft moral. Examining the role of both the bureaucracy and the general public, Eayrs concluded that neither the public service nor the public at large is specially equipped...to confront statesmen with their wrong-doing. Rather, in view, that task was best left to intellectuals-particularly university professors. Indeed, the conclusion of the lecture was a spirited admonition to the intellectual to keep faith by refusing to enter the service of the state or consulting for government. Rather, he should maintain his distance from those who want to buy thoughts. intellectual's obligation was thus to embrace the intellect of and engage in detached analysis and condemnation of foreign policy.5Right and Wrong in Foreign Policy, written at a time when the United States was dramatically increasing its military commitment to fight against an externally supported insurgency in Vietnam, reflects the degree to which normative issues were looming larger in Eayrs's work, reflected most clearly in the informed condemnation that marked popular, more journalistic writings in the late 19605 and early 19705.'' Read four decades later, Right and Wrong in Foreign Policy still resonates, and not just because another American administration is enmeshed in another military campaign against an externally supported insurgency in Iraq. It resonates also because Eayrs's reflections on morality in foreign policy provide us with a useful framework for the assessment of Canadian statecraft over the last 40 years.EAYRS ON REALISM AND IDEALISMEayrs's lectures reflected the common view in the academic discipline of international relations at the time that there were two broad historical approaches to the issue of morality in international politics- the realist and the idealist. …

Empire and the state: a critical theoretical assessment

In recent years there has been increasing use of the term ‘empire’ to describe US primacy in world affairs. This should not be viewed merely as an indictment of US power: there are genuine insights to be gained from the study of imperial formations in contemporary politics. Yet there remains confusion and disagreement over the true meaning of ‘empire’. Progressive schools of thought in the academic discipline of international relations can facilitate a fresh understanding of ‘empire’—one that is suited to the complexities of the contemporary global scene.

Interwar Internationalism, the British Labour Party, and the Historiography of International Relations

This article questions two interrelated myths pertaining to the interwar internationalism of the British Labour Party and the theories of so-called idealists in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). In IR, interwar “idealists” are (in)famous for a detached and utopian approach to international politics. Conventional historiographical verdicts on the international policy of the Labour Party in the interwar period suggest that the party was the practical mirror of this naive international outlook. In fact, the two themes are connected, most notably through Labour's Advisory Committee on International Questions . This article brings the study of Labour's internationalism and the international theories of purported idealists together by focusing on debates on the League of Nations and the use of force. The analysis reveals that conventional historiographical narratives are inadequate and too simplistic for grasping the diversity of Labour's internationalism and interwar progressivist ideas about international politics in general.

The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals and the new politics of international relations

More than a decade after the revolutions of 1989, we can see these as a high point of a new, worldwide and increasingly global wave of democratic revolution and counter-revolution. Violent struggles between the political forces unleashed have produced genocidal wars and stimulated global state formation. These developments present concerned citizens and students of international relations and politics with new challenges. This article criticizes two trends in the responses of political intellectuals in the West: the ‘new anarchism’ of some critical thinkers in the academic discipline of international relations, and ‘yesterday's radicalism’ which has led some left-wing critics to revive the defence of sovereignty for repressive and genocidal non-Western states. The lecture concludes by outlining an alternative ‘new politics’ of international relations

What's the use of International Relations?

This article discusses some controversies over the relations of the academic discipline of International Relations to policy. The article argues that, while our ultimate goal may be to have some impact on the world, the immediate goals can be more abstract. International Relations consists, and should consist, of a set of Lakatosian Research Programmes, some conflicting, some complementary, which range from the abstract to the directly policy-relevant. Effective intervention in social systems depends on analyses in more than commonsense terms. The article looks sceptically on recent disciplinary history, doubting both the supposed positivist hegemony and the supposed novelty of normative debate.

IR theory after the Cold War

The end of the Cold War has prompted a good deal of soul-searching in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). Some results of this process are already apparent; the dominant version of realism, neorealism, is developing in new directions in an attempt to address major areas where the theory has been shown to contain weaknesses (e.g. domestic politics, international cooperation, the analysis of change). Liberal IR-theory is becoming less focused on international institutions and has devoted more attention to the larger issues of democracy and democratization, sovereignty, and change in the context of modernization and globalization. Some bodies of established theory are receiving fresh attention, including the International Society (or English) School, and there is a renewed interest in the field of international political economy.Many thanks to Kenneth Glarbo, Knud Erik J?rgensen, Michael Nicholson, Steve Smith, and Alexander Wendt for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

A Note on Some Recent Writings on International Relations and Organizations1

Broadly speaking, books which come naturally under the rubric of 'International relations and organizations' are concerned with certain basic questions which recur in the academic discipline of international relations (IR): how is the world structured and institutionalized, and how do the institutions work? How do the units of the world come to be what they are? What are the dominant patterns of behaviour they exhibit, and what is the quality of life they enjoy? How has the world come to be structured in this way? Where ought the world to be going? How are we to answer such a question? And are there signs that it is going in that or any other way? One set of writers in IR who have concentrated their attention on some of these basic questions, and produced a relatively well thought out set of answers, with family resemblances among them, are those who have come to be known as the 'English school'. It would not be very sensible to be categorical about who is inside, outside, of this school. I was reminded of this when reading a draft version of Tim Dunne's just published book on the English school, Inventing international society: a history of the English school (Basingstoke: Macmillan, I998). Still, it makes sense, in my view at least, to talk of close family resemblances among the following writers: C. A. W Manning, Hedley Bull, F S. Northedge, Alan James, Martin Wight, Adam Watson, and R. J. Vincent. These authors are predominantly mid-I97os and mid-ig8os writers, and predate by a decade the rise of'critical theoretical' perspectives within IR.Ten years is a long time in a still relatively young discipline.2