Academic Study Of International Relations Research Articles

Outer space as a geographical domain: A contribution to laying the foundations for astropolitics

The paper presents an effort to contribute to the foundations of astropolitics by presenting the central characteristics of outer space as a geographical domain. Given that current international trends point to the increasingly active role of states and private companies in the utilization of space, understanding the opportunities and limitations that the environment of outer space poses on human action represents the foundation of a systematic analysis of the international politics of outer space. Starting from the assumption that space can be viewed as a geographical domain, similar to land, sea or air, the paper presents key physical characteristics of space and the central problem fields of the social constitution of space, which are then placed in the context of geopolitical thought. The paper is divided into three parts where the first part provides a brief history of astropolitical thought, the second presents the universe as a geographical domain by identifying physical and social properties of the space environment, and the third part observes the space environment through the ?ecological triad? of Harold and Margaret Sprout and Harvey Starr?s ?opportunity and willingness? framework to explain how the physical and social properties of outer space impact international politics. The author concludes that, since outer space will be a more and more important area in the future, academic study of international relations in space will be increasingly relevant, thus requiring knowledge of the basics of astropolitics, i.e., outer space itself and the features that characterize it as a geographical domain.

Bridging the Other Side of the Gap: Teaching “Practical Theory” to Future Practitioners

Abstract Much has been written about the need to “bridge the gap” between the academic study of international relations—particularly policy-oriented subfields such as foreign policy analysis and security studies—and the needs of policymakers. This important agenda largely focuses on encouraging academics to produce more policy-relevant, accessible research. While such efforts are indispensable, they neglect another important piece of the equation: teaching future policymakers how to translate theory into practice. The bridge needs to be a two-way street. Scholars add value for policy because their work is grounded in theory, offering analytical structure to make sense of a complex world. But applying theory to policy is unlikely to resonate with practitioners who do not have the basic conceptual literacy to grasp why theory-informed research is relevant to their own hands-on concerns. We therefore propose a teaching approach we term “practical theory,” geared specifically for professionally oriented students. Drawing on our own experience in teaching, developing curriculum, and writing for students in professional master's degree programs, we recommend instructors: choose theories and frameworks that are most likely to be useful in practice, update these theories for the times as needed, reconsider nomenclature and banish unnecessary academic jargon, and apply theory early and often.

Cuestionando consensos: algunos apuntes frente al —¿eventual?— ascenso de los BRICS como poderes globales

El presente artículo es una invitación a la reflexión. En los estudios internacionales damos por sentadas muchas realidades que, ante el escrutinio de reflexiones teóricas y la aplicación de metodologías de investigación —como los modelos con premisas importadas de la economía y la teoría de juegos— pueden poner en duda esas conclusiones o llevarnos a plantear nuevos escenarios. El ejercicio se hace, en este caso, a propósito de lo que se ha denominado el ascenso de los BRICS y las expectativas que este ha generado.

Cold War Revisionism Revisited: The Radical Historians of U.S. Empire

In the early years of the Cold War, the academic study of international relations was an ideological tool serving the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. But in the 1960s, a new generation of scholars began to challenge the reigning orthodoxy. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Women, wars, and world affairs: Recovering feminist International Relations, 1915–39

AbstractThe academic study of International Relations (IR) emerged in the context of transnational networks of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and activists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, women belonged to these networks in various capacities and, crucially, contributed to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Whether as members of pressure groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), as independent authors or academics, they discussed all major issues of IR. Drawing on a range of international authors – including Anna B. Eckstein, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Lucy Mair, Margery Perham, Helena Swanwick, and Louise Weiss – this article recovers the intellectual substance of their work, arguing that it constitutes a genuinely feminist approach to IR. Early feminist IR authors emphasised the interests of women, children, and other marginalised groups, they demanded female representation in government and diplomacy, they condemned imperialism and racism, opposed military capitalism, employed religious, emotional, and universalist rhetoric, and advocated the role of education. Despite widespread male domination, women taught at universities, published in academic journals, spoke at conferences, and organised international summer schools. This article explores the origins of feminist IR scholarship and contextualises this body of thought within the revisionist history of IR.

Of mustard seeds and shopping lists: C.A.W. Manning and international relations at the LSE

Research note on an episode in the history of the academic study of international relations involving the ultimately mixed results of the efforts by Professor Charles Manning to build the subject as an independent discipline at the LSE.

The ends of International Relations theory: Stages of reflexivity and modes of theorizing

International Relations theory is being squeezed between two sides. On the one hand, the world of practitioners and attached experts often perceive International Relations theory as misleading if it does not correspond to practical knowledge, and redundant when it does. The academic study of international relations can and should not be anything beyond the capacity to provide political judgement which comes through reflection on the historical experience of practitioners. On the other hand, and within its disciplinary confines, International Relations theory is reduced to a particular type of empirical theory with increasing resistance to further self-reflection. Instead, this article argues that neither reduction is viable. Reducing theory to practical knowledge runs into self-contradictions; reducing theorizing to its empirical mode underestimates the constitutive function of theories, the role of concepts, and hence the variety of necessary modes of theorizing. I present this twofold claim in steps of increasing reflexivity in International Relations theory and propose four modes of theorizing: normative, meta-theoretical, ontological/constitutive and empirical.

Moving Political Meaning across Linguistic Frontiers

Diplomacy, international commerce and the academic study of international relations are all based on the assumption that we can cross linguistic borders with very complicated words and concepts in our cognitive luggage. This article studies the complexities of communicating political words and concepts from one language/culture to another, noting that traditional political science has shown little interest in this process or its dangers. From linguistics, however, come two opposing theories: the effability principle defends universal translatability, while the linguistic relativity/Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that meaning (particularly abstract conceptual thinking) is locked within the grammatical and semantic structure of individual languages and can be transmitted with difficulty or not at all. After considering these rival positions, we conclude that the translation of political ideas from culture to culture can be more problematic than we have commonly believed.

The Theory and Practice of Global Governance: The Worst of All Possible Worlds?

This article takes the example of global governance in order to reflect on the problematic relationship between theory and practice and on the gap that exists between the academic and policy worlds. That there is a gap between the two worlds is clear. Some insist on the benefits to be gained from trying to bridge the gap, highlighting the contribution that theoretical inquiry can make to the policy world and the responsibility of academics to contribute towards resolving policy challenges. Others argue for the continued importance of a division of labour, stressing that the logic of theoretical enquiry demands analytical and critical distance from power and politics. This article does not examine either of these extreme positions but instead explores the dangers of the middle road. For academics, insufficient awareness of the problematic ways in which theory and practice are inextricably interwoven makes it more likely that they will fall hostage to the politics and parochial prejudices of both time and place. For policymakers and for those who teach public policy, the danger lies in seeking the authority and legitimacy of academic work that purportedly embodies objectivity and detachment but that in fact merely translates the prejudices and preoccupations of the policy world back into a different idiom. An unreflective and uncritical attitude to the relationship between theory and practice can leave the academic study of International Relations in the worst of all possible worlds.

C. A. W. Manning and the Discipline of International Relations

As one of the first holders of a Chair in International Relations, Charles Manning was a significant early proponent of and advocate for the now wildly popular academic study of international relations. In his lifetime he may have lost the battle over the vision of the discipline that he propounded. But it is arguable that his views resonate more today than they did when he died in 1978.

Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique

We are...in a in which power figures and reconfigures; in which human artifice must struggle with human necessities; in which notions such as justice, freedom, compassion, and autonomy, authority, legitimacy, security and force animate, constrain, and enable human beings in each and every arena within which they engage one another. Jean Bethke Elshtain In our own times we can neither endure our thoughts nor task of rethinking them. We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking framed. William E. Gonnolly The role of language in constitution of social and political life has long been overlooked in academic study of international relations. The most influential theoretical approaches, those that dominate debate in U.S. political science, remain firmly wedded to a correspondence theory of truth and elusive quest for a scientific understanding of world. (1) Concerns about language and intersubjectivity are deemed irrelevant in positivist mission to explain pattern(s) of politics. It as if much of twentieth-century social theory and philosophy had never been written. Nevertheless, over last few years, a plethora of critical voices have sought to challenge this pervasive attitude, and their work has made an indelible impression on topography of field, undermining its boundaries, questioning its questions and problematizing its practices. (2) The starting point for many of these critical approaches--which include postmodernism(s)/poststructuralism(s), most forms of feminism, and some constructivists--has been work produced in wake of linguistic in social and political theory. (3) This turn has followed a number of diverse routes, encompassing universal pragmatics propounded by Habermas and Apel, transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, ordinary language analysis of Wittgenstein and Austin, and hermeneutics of, among others, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, in social and political theory in general, and international-relations theory in particular, much of this intellectual terrain remains under-explored. One important project that developed by what in this article I am calling Cambridge School (CS) of historians--in particular, by Quentin Skinner. Kari Palonen, for example, has claimed that Skinner should be regarded as one of the few dissidents in contemporary academic world who concentrat e on role of conceptual-linguistic transformation in unfolding of history; and Charles Taylor argues that Skinner has formulated an interesting and challenging political theory. (4) This article outlines Skinnerian position in relation to IR, and as such it a partial response to Ken Booth's contention that it is vital that students of IR give language more attention than hitherto, as words shape as well as reflect reality. (5) The CS approach has much to offer theorist of international politics, especially through its focus on historicity of conceptual change and its understanding of how political legitimacy embedded in and constrained by set of political vocabularies available at any given time. Why have implications for political theory inherent in CS project been largely overlooked? The CS authors, and Skinner in particular, are usually bracketed as historians, and aspects of their work that relate to political theory remain unnoticed or are assumed to refer primarily to study of history of ideas. (6) This characterization a mistake, for within arguments sketched by CS authors can be discerned an important approach to understanding social and political life. By concentrating on conceptual change and constitutive role played by language in shaping normative architecture of (any given) society, we can reach a more sophisticated understanding of language in both reproduction of social norms and conventions and consequently in process(es) of change itself. …

Towards a feminist international ethics

The title of this article brings together two terms, the latter, ‘international ethics’, is instantly recognizable as referring to a distinct aspect of the academic study of international relations with its own canonic tradition and debates. The former term, ‘feminist’, is much less familiar, and for many normative theorists in international relations refers to a political movement and set of ideological positions whose relevance to international ethics is far from clear. It is therefore necessary to engage in some preliminary explanation of the term ‘feminism’ and how it has come to be linked to ‘international ethics’ in recent scholarship in order to set out the argument of this article. It is only in the last fifteen years that theoretical perspectives under the label of feminism have come to be applied to international relations, although they have a rather longer history within other social sciences and, significantly, within ethical theory. Feminism as a political movement comes in a variety of ideological forms and the same is true of feminism within the academy. The common theme which connects diverse theoretical positions under the label of ‘feminism’ is the claim that paying attention to the ways in which social reality is ‘gendered’ has a productive impact on how it is to be understood, judged and may be changed. What counts as ‘productive’ is related not simply to the goal of enriching understanding and judgment as such (by drawing attention to its gendered dimension), but to the explicitly political goal of exposing and addressing the multiple ways in which both women and men are oppressed by gendered relations of power. It is clear, from the first, therefore, that there is a powerfully normative agenda inherent in any perspective labelled as ‘feminist’.

Ethics in international relations: a constitutive theory

Most questions commonly asked about international politics are ethical ones. Should the international community intervene in Bosnia? What do we owe the starving in Somalia? What should be done about the genocide in Rwanda? Yet, Mervyn Frost argues, ethics is accorded a marginal position within the academic study of international relations. In this book he examines the reasons given for this, and finds that they do not stand up to scrutiny. He goes on to evaluate those ethical theories which do exist within the discipline - order based theories, utilitarian theories, and rights based theories - and finds them unconvincing. He elaborates his own ethical theory, constitutive theory, which is derived from Hegel, and highlights the way in which we constitute one another as moral beings through a process of reciprocal recognition within a hierarchy of institutions which include the family, civil society, the state, and the society of states.

At Home Abroad, Abroad at Home: International Liberalisation and Domestic Stability in the New World Economy

The two most enduring contemporaneous accounts of the inter-war period are E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. The perspectives from which the two authors wrote could barely have differed more. Carr is best remembered today for pulverizing the idealist foundations of liberal internationalism, and thereby preparing the ground for the postwar ascendancy of realist discourse in the academic study of international relations. Polanyi;s intellectual pedigree and legacy are more complex. He delivered a searing indictment of the social destructiveness of unregulated market forces and the moral mutilation he attributed to market rationality. For these views, Polanyi was later adopted by the New Left. However, he anchored his critique in an organic conception of society that was, in point of fact, deeply conservative in the traditionalist sense of that term.

Culture, democracy, and political conflict management in Asia and the Pacific: An agenda for research

Abstract One of the most problematic political issues in the late twentieth century is the relationship between culture and democracy which is, in turn, related to issues concerning the resolution of political conflict within state boundaries as well as between states. One purpose of this article is to provide an outline of these concerns with special reference to problems arising from cultural relativist perspectives on political institutions and practices on the one hand, and universalist assumptions on the other. In addition, it will be argued that the new agenda in the academic study of international relations can clearly benefit from the insights provided by a number of other social science disciplines. At the same time, it will be shown that disciplines concerned with such matters as democratic theory also need to broaden their scope of enquiry to the sphere of international politics.

Mythology or methodology? Traditions in international theory

The development of the academic study of international relations has been peculiarly conditioned by traditions of thought. Martin Wight was the first theorist to reject the binary dualism of the founding traditions of realism and idealism, as he believed it to be ‘the reflection of a diseased situation’. In its place Wight constructed three traditions of Realism, Rationalism and Revolutionism.These served as the foundations for his lectures on international theory given at the London School of Economics in the 1950s which, as Brian Porter acknowledges, ‘have been more heard about than heard’. Due to the relative paucity of Wight's printed legacy, scholars have had to piece together the fragments of his ideas on international theory. With the publication of these twelve lectures there is now a rich resource to be mined, and for this reason, the academy of international relations owes a considerable debt to the editors, Brian Porter and Gabriele Wight, for preserving and transmitting these remarkable orations on international theory.

Harts J. Morgenthau and the legacy of political realism

It is over fifty years since a young scholar named Hans J. Morgenthau sought refuge in the United States, and forty years since the publication of his influential text, Politics Among Nations. Morgenthau's ‘theory’ of political realism figures prominently in the academic study of international relations during these years and shows no sign of disappearing. Many of those scholars who differ markedly from Morgenthau regard it as worthwhile or.at least necessary to respond to his arguments. If perhaps for no other reason than that it is an appealing target, Morgenthau's political realism remains an important subject of evaluation for even its most serious and most severe critics.

Three concepts of internationalism

The subject-matter of the academic discipline of international relations is often thought of as being very much a question of facts: tracing the foreign policy of one country here, the relations between states in a particular region there. More loosely it can be described as the reflective analysis of current affairs. These elements are all, or should be, of interest to the academic study of international relations; but they do not constitute what one may term the core of the discipline as it has developed in universities since the first departments were established after the First World War. Rather, the core of international relations is constituted by two other, more general, concerns. One is the question how and with what concepts to analyse relations between states and across frontiers. What regularities can be observed, what causes can be divined, what analytical categories can best explain such phenomena as inter-state conflict, the impact of nationalism, the role of the economic in international contexts? The second is the question of value, of the normative. When is it legitimate to intervene or use force; what are our obligations to the states in which we happen to be born or find ourselves as opposed to other, international, entities; what forms of international economic relationship are preferable on grounds of justice; what forms of association and solidarity, and at what cost, is it appropriate to argue for?