Conventional International Relations Research Articles

Political Invisibility: Structural Realism and The Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation

This research critically examined the intersection of structural realism, normativity, and political invisibility, with a particular focus on its implications for peripheral actors in international relations (IR), exemplified by the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation. Based on the assumption that structural realism governs Western foreign policy, the research investigated the possibility of political invisibility not as an indication of weakness but as a strategic method for political liberation. Through a theoretical analysis that contrasted the normative assumptions of structural realism with critical theory, a qualitative methodology, integrating a critical literature review and a case study analysis were employed in the research in order to dissect the dynamics of political invisibility and its potential as an emancipatory force. The results indicated that political invisibility, when utilised effectively, can function as a subversive instrument enabling marginalised actors such as the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation to maneuver through and capitalise on the normative oversights of structural realism. This subversion challenges conventional IR perspectives by demonstrating how marginalised groups can assert agency and sovereignty despite systemic exclusion from central dialogues and decision-making processes. The scientific novelty of this study lay in its focused critique of structural realism through the lens of political invisibility and the politics of refusal, offering a unique perspective on the agency of peripheral actors in IR. Its practical significance emerges from the potential applications of these insights in fostering a more inclusive and equitable global political discourse, emphasising the strategic potential of invisibility for political mobilisation and emancipation. By positioning political invisibility as a catalyst for emancipatory politics, this research contributed to a broader discourse on power dynamics within IR, challenging established norms and suggesting a paradigm shift towards recognising and leveraging the political agency of marginalised actors.

Can China’s Developmental Peace Be an Alternative to Liberal Peace? A Critical Feminist Interrogation

A growing body of literature within international relations (IR) has attempted to understand China’s approach to peacebuilding, so-called developmental peace, mostly in relation to critiques of liberal peace. The literature shares an assumption that developmental peace is distinct from liberal peace and discusses whether Chinese peacebuilding efforts might function as an alternative to the liberal approach. The discussion largely draws on conventional IR perspectives involving only limited engagement with critical scholars. It therefore lacks analysis of hierarchies related to gender and local power relations. By contrast, this article critically interrogates existing arguments to examine the extent to which developmental peace differs from liberal peace and in what sense it can be seen as an alternative. Informed by feminist IR, the article explores three core elements of developmental peace: developmentalism, the absence of the political and South-South cooperation. It shows that developmental peace largely replicates and reinforces the limitations of liberal peace by marginalising women and minority groups, and failing to prioritise local needs. Based on these findings, it argues that China might be an emerging actor that, in a nominal sense, can diversify the field, but that developmental peace does not constitute an alternative perspective in any substantive sense.

The legacy of the Arab uprisings on Turkey’s foreign policy: Ankara’s regional power delusion

In the aftermath of the Arab upheavals, Turkey pursued an overambitious regional leadership agenda that appeared incompatible with its underlying capabilities. In retrospect, there was sufficient evidence in the wake of the Arab upheavals that Turkey’s power capacity did not match the assertive rhetoric used by Turkish ruling elites that the region should be remade in their image. However, Turkish foreign policy was not fine-tuned to the situation. On the contrary, Turkey increased the assertiveness of its tone. In the face of ample empirical evidence pointing to the unsustainability of Turkish leadership’s ambitions in the region, why did an overhaul not take place in its Middle East policies? Drawing from multiple qualitative data sources, this study argues that at least two factors explain this paradox: (i) overconfidence that led to glaze-over effects and (ii) the civilisational perspective of the ruling elite, which underestimated conventional international relations parameters.

Moscow’s Strategic Culture: Russian Militarism in an Era of Great Power Competition

Shifting balances in power realities increase uncertainty and tensions among states. During those times of rising powers and changing alliances, it is imperative to understand how states determine adversaries and how they choose to engage threats. However, biases in decision making at the state level obscure a conceptualization of state action and intent. This article argues that the study of strategic culture helps bridge the gap between state-level biases and actions at the structural level. Furthermore, the understanding of militarism as Russia’s strategic culture helps contextualize certain Kremlin policy choices that seem to fall outside conventional international relations frameworks. A better understanding of Russia’s strategic lens brings insights into Moscow’s actions, particularly within the near abroad.

African experiences and alternativity in International Relations theorizing about security

Abstract Deconstructing International Relations (IR) episteme acknowledges its generation of power imbalances in security knowledge that relegate African experiences to the margins of global politics. Central to this process of relegation is a pervasive ‘methodological whiteness’, which, while eliding coloniality and racism, projects white experience as a universal perspective. Accompanying this Eurocentric bias has been the intrusive projection of the Weberian state as the most effective site for security governance and conflict prevention on a continent with states that are characterized by a hybridity of political orders, which deviate substantially from the ideal-type state that they seek to mimic. Not only has this resulted in disastrous policies in many parts of Africa, but critical questions arise as to the relevance of conventional IR and security studies as neutral sites for dispassionate knowledge production and policy-making on African security, thereby necessitating alternative perspectives. This article reflects on the ways in which IR and security studies have been responsible, in part, for the production of a racialized mode of security knowledge generation that obfuscates the security policies and experiences of people in African locales. It draws on insights from post-colonial discourses and the episteme of alternativity to explore how the study of events and processes in Africa in a theoretically conscious manner could advance IR scholarship as a whole. It contends that incorporating African experiences as they manifest through hybrid security orders can broaden the empirical base for IR theorizing about security since they offer another perspective outside the conventional western assumptions and experiences.

Relational Indigenous systems: Aboriginal Australian political ordering and reconfiguring IR

AbstractOntological parochialism persists in International Relations (IR) scholarship among gestures towards relational ontological reinvention. Meanwhile, the inter-polity relations of many Indigenous peoples pre-date contemporary IR and tend to be substantively relational. This situation invites rethinking of IR's understandings of political order and inter-polity relations. We take up this task by laying out necessary methodological innovations to engage with Aboriginal Australia and then showing how conventional and much recent heterodox IR seek to create forms of ‘escape’ from lived political relations by asserting the powerful yet problematic social science mechanism of observer's distance. This demonstrates a need to take Aboriginal Australia as a system on its own terms to speak back to IR. We next explain how Aboriginal Australian people produce political order on the Australian continent through a ‘relational-ecological’ disposition that contrasts with IR's predominant ‘survivalist’ disposition. The accompanying capacity to manage survivalism through relationalism provides an avenue for engaging with and recasting some of mainstream IR's survivalist assumptions, including by considering an Aboriginal approach to multipolarity, without attempting ‘pure escape’ through alternative ontologies. We thus argue that while it is necessary to critique and recast dominant IR, doing so requires putting dominant IR and Indigenous understandings into relational exchange.

Regional economic integration on China’s Inland periphery: the Jilin-Northeast Asia Case

Why has China’s economic integration with Asia lagged in the northeast despite high expectations since the 1990s? China-centered integration in Asia is best understood at the Chinese subnational level. The interaction of central, local, and international interests under given structural and historical conditions produces distinct provincial trajectories of foreign economic engagement. While central state interests dictate policy choice under authoritarian rule, policy outcomes are shaped through local feedback effects and institutional innovations to manage transnational exchange. The Jilin-Northeast Asia case over the past two decades shows a negative orientation of such dynamics, stemming from a poor alignment of interests, the region’s structural constraints, and a socialist historical legacy. By tracing change and continuity on China’s late-developing, inland periphery, this study points to the subnational dimensions of cross-border integration obscured by conventional international relations scholarship, and presents the other side of China’s coastal success story. China’s ongoing plans for Asian integration are linked to the long-term development of China’s own regions rather than just aspirations abroad.

Missing from the Map: Chinese Exceptionalism, Sovereignty Regimes and the Belt Road Initiative

ABSTRACT Historical and conventional international relations (IR) frameworks describe the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics that positions China as moving away from its long-time reticence towards foreign entanglements. This raises a contradiction of China being at one and the same time both a defender of its own territorial sovereignty while also being engaged in various projects, particularly the BRI and the associated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), that point in completely different directions. This paper seeks to build upon and move beyond conventional framings to understand how the BRI represents a conflict over the workings of state sovereignty that such frameworks have trouble addressing. We argue that the absence of an official Chinese government BRI map promotes a ‘useful fuzziness’ with regards to China being open to crafting a new as of yet undefined geopolitical identity. In light of the absence of such a map, this work considers key ideas relating to China’s geopolitical expansion via the BRI in terms of so-called sovereignty regimes – the idea that various practices of authority and control emanating originally from states take different geographical shapes. Conflicts arise when a state, such as China, finds itself caught between the operational imperatives of multiple regimes. By identifying the current sovereignty dynamics raised by the BRI in light of the relevant, yet distinctive historical experience of the Marshall Plan, this work can be used as a model for understanding how China’s current leadership is managing the debate of simultaneously protecting ‘strong borders’ yet also promoting a policy of ‘going out’.

The Marxian influence on Leonard Woolf’s theory of imperialism

In his own time, Leonard Woolf was one of the most prolific and respected experts on international affairs. Yet, his paramount place in the field fell rapidly, partly because he was a writer whose ideas have been labelled as utopian. This article employs Woolf to challenge the orthodox narrative of the discipline of International Relations (IR) that oversimplifies the early stages of the field as a dichotomy between idealism and realism. While this has already been done cogently by Peter Wilson, this article discloses a Marxist dimension in Woolf’s thought and writings. This is particularly important given that Marxism has regained significance in recent IR debates. Through a contextualist approach, this article demonstrates that Woolf represents a considerable challenge to conventional IR historiography and reveals the significance of Marxian-based understandings in the early stages of the discipline as an alternative to idealism and realism. In addition, this article shows some of the distinctiveness in Woolf’s Marxian writings on imperialism as an alternative to Leninist understandings.

Fear Without Rationality: Emotions in Lithuanian Foreign Policy

Abstract The paper reflects on the conception of the phenomenon of fear employed in the international relations theory. A critique of understanding of fear as a rational incentive of conventional international relations theories paves the way for the notion of fear as an emotion. It is argued that the behaviour of states in international politics should be explained via their psychological and emotional aspects. The paper proposes to connect the arising of and experiencing fear with collective memory and the imagery entrenched in nations’ subconscious. It also proposes to distinguish the two levels of arising of and experiencing the emotion of fear, namely the attempt to consciously arouse fear and its nonconscious experience. On the first level, mnemonic-emotive agents consciously activate collective emotions via the nation’s collective memory. On the second, once the contents/imagery of the society’s subconscious are activated, the aroused emotions are nonconsciously experienced by the society. The paper offers a case study from the Lithuanian foreign policy: its relations with Russia. Discourse analysis of Lithuania-Russia relations, where President Dalia Grybauskaitė plays an active and important role in discourse formation, suggests that the formation of Lithuanian foreign policy, with regard to Russia, is affected by the emotion of fear.

The Power of the Political in an Urbanizing International.

In this article, I argue that there is a startling resonance between Hans Morgenthau’s conception of the political and power and recent analyses of an urbanizing international realm. By making this connection clear, I depart from a mechanistic understanding of politics, which tends to inform both conventional International Relations views and some claims in urban studies pertaining to the rise of global cities as international actors. Turning to Morgenthau’s conception of the political and power also has wider implications for International Relations studies of urbanization: it helps explain a tendency toward depoliticization caused by ignoring the conflictual character of the political. The emphasis on the political, on the other hand, serves as a bridge between International Relations and urbanization studies by creating conditions for the repoliticization of urban space. After illustrating the existential manifestation of the political and its violent outfalls, the remainder of this article turns to its relational and dialogical manifestation that points out the shortcomings of reading the political merely as an existential concept in the context of urbanization.

After decision-making: the operationalization of norms in International Relations

Research on norms in International Relations (IR) includes various concepts related to how norms influence actions. These approaches focus on the decision-making process, and largely neglect the operationalization of norms. This omission leads to an analytical gap: a lack of attention to how the substance of abstract norms is transformed and constructed in the operationalization process. This article draws on the Foucauldian theme of governmentality to introduce a novel perspective on operationalizing norms. It focusses in particular on the role of techniques as understudied parts inherent to the reflexive processes of operationalization and meaning production. The article thereby contests the prevalence of fundamental norms in conventional IR theory. It demonstrates, instead, that global governance techniques do not simply translate rationalities into practice, but construct their very own normativities. These theoretical reflections are illustrated by analysing the operationalization of norms through indicators in the case of the European Union’s human rights policy.

The Power of the Political in an Urbanizing International

In this article I argue that there is a startling resonance between Hans Morgenthau’s conception of politics and the political and the ones implicit in analyses of urbanization processes and outputs. The advantage of making this connection clear is that it helps scholars of International Relations and urbanization to see the political and different carvings more clearly. This helps depart from a mechanistic understanding of politics that informs conventional International Relations views and some of the claims of urban studies about global cities displacing states as international actors. Turning to the conception of the political has wider implications for International Relations studies of urbanization: It helps to gain a more profound understanding of de-politization tendencies caused by the process of urbanization and its research. The emphasis on the political serves as a bridge between International Relations and urbanization studies and how both relate to one another. An urbanizing international does not only produce de-politicization and conflict. It also creates the conditions for the re-politicization of urban space. After illustrating the conflictual existential manifestation of the political, the remainder of the paper turns to its relational manifestation that points out the shortcomings of existential readings of the political in contexts of urbanization.

The “Double-Battle”: women combatants and their embodied experiences in war zones

ABSTRACTOur study contributes to the ongoing debate about women in combat by exploring women combatants’ experiences of war through interviews with women soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces who served as combatants or in combat-support roles in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We proffer that the bodily experiences of women combatants disturb conventional international relations and hegemonic masculine war metanarratives that either abstract or glorify combat. These otherwise silenced narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender integration in the military. We conclude the article with a reflection on the challenges facing researchers investigating war and terrorism.

Western Theories and the non-Western World

Conventional international relations (IR) builds on Western problems and remain fixated on the Western understanding of war and conflict. Such ontology is grossly misleading to reflect upon and make sense of conflicts of the non-Western world. Western theories are based on ontological imaginations that are removed from the historical and sociological experiences of the non-Western world. Understanding non-Western conflicts requires an ontology based on the experiential reality of the post-colonial other. However, unless local variants are sufficiently factored in, it may also become as hegemonic as the Western imagination/s that it wishes to resist, counter and transcend. Conflicts in post-colonial societies demand explanatory frames sensitive to their historical and sociological specificities. The challenge before academic IR remains to question its Eurocentric ontology and historicise the subjectivity of the non-Western world. Epistemology is not the site for this much-needed breakthrough. Understanding the non-West is prior to understanding its conflicts.

Homer’s Iliad and Modern IR

The author asserts that a liberal arts approach to teaching International Relations (IR) is a unique way to teach undergraduates and to conduct research that is reflective of and relevant to real-world situations. A liberal arts approach includes interdisciplinarity, a bottom-up method to balance the top-down elite orientation of conventional IR, and data collection that focuses on human beings in real-life, concrete conditions. The article offers specific examples of interdisciplinarity in the classroom, including the use of literature, visual arts, and music, to enrich students' understanding of international relations.

Decolonizing International Relations: Perspectives from Latin America

This article joins a growing chorus of voices aiming to decolonize International Relations (IR). It argues that the location of Latin America is ideally placed to bring a significant critique of IR because of its intimate relationship to one of the conventional IR's key protagonists: the USA. The analysis involves thinking about the USA from a historical and theoretical position in Latin America, exploring the always intimate relationship between the two. It draws its inspiration particularly from Latin American theorization of the “coloniality of power” and explores two decolonial strategies: thinking about the emergence of a globally powerful USA through coloniality theorizing and examining the political possibilities of “border thinking” and “diversality” within the “colonial difference” for a decolonial IR. The article seeks to open a field of discussion which positions Latin America as a site for critical thinking and action, and a heartland of decolonial struggle.

Making serious measures: numerical indices, peer review, and transnational actor-networks

Numerical indices and peer review processes, which are used increasingly to assess and rank countries, are relatively novel governance instruments. They have serious practical consequences and pose conceptual challenges for conventional international relations theories. This article draws on concepts from actor-network theory (ANT) to analyse the differences between these two mechanisms, their relationship to networks, their differing materialities, and how they succeed or fail. These concepts include actants, translation, enrolment, black-boxing, obligatory passage points, and immutable or mutable mobiles, which together provide useful insights into the way in which humans and objects work together in transnational networks to produce, alter, or resist power. The article argues that ANT can address some problems associated with the concept of governmentality, while complementing its strengths. Numerical indices and peer review processes engage with humans, objects, and networks in different ways and this can alter how larger global forces are or are not transmitted, modified, or resisted. The article explores the empirical relevance of these concepts by examining the World Governance Indicators and the African Peer Review Mechanism review of Benin.

Framing health and foreign policy: lessons for global health diplomacy

Global health financing has increased dramatically in recent years, indicative of a rise in health as a foreign policy issue. Several governments have issued specific foreign policy statements on global health and a new term, global health diplomacy, has been coined to describe the processes by which state and non-state actors engage to position health issues more prominently in foreign policy decision-making. Their ability to do so is important to advancing international cooperation in health. In this paper we review the arguments for health in foreign policy that inform global health diplomacy. These are organized into six policy frames: security, development, global public goods, trade, human rights and ethical/moral reasoning. Each of these frames has implications for how global health as a foreign policy issue is conceptualized. Differing arguments within and between these policy frames, while overlapping, can also be contradictory. This raises an important question about which arguments prevail in actual state decision-making. This question is addressed through an analysis of policy or policy-related documents and academic literature pertinent to each policy framing with some assessment of policy practice. The reference point for this analysis is the explicit goal of improving global health equity. This goal has increasing national traction within national public health discourse and decision-making and, through the Millennium Development Goals and other multilateral reports and declarations, is entering global health policy discussion. Initial findings support conventional international relations theory that most states, even when committed to health as a foreign policy goal, still make decisions primarily on the basis of the 'high politics' of national security and economic material interests. Development, human rights and ethical/moral arguments for global health assistance, the traditional 'low politics' of foreign policy, are present in discourse but do not appear to dominate practice. While political momentum for health as a foreign policy goal persists, the framing of this goal remains a contested issue. The analysis offered in this article may prove helpful to those engaged in global health diplomacy or in efforts to have global governance across a range of sectoral interests pay more attention to health equity impacts.

Legitimacy and Institutional Replacement: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Emergence of the Mine Ban Treaty

AbstractWhen and under what conditions is an existing international institution most likely to be replaced by a new one? Conventional international relations theories offer only partial insights into this question and seldom address it directly. But replacement occurs in a variety of important international contexts. For example, the United Nations replaced the League of Nations, the WTO replaced the GATT, and most recently, the Ottawa Convention banning landmines replaced Protocol II of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). I argue that the concept of legitimacy, commonly defined as “the belief that an institution ought to be obeyed,” and careful attention to the development of the existing institution are necessary to understand replacement. After developing a theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between legitimacy and replacement, this article traces the origins and development of the largely overlooked institutional predecessor to the Ottawa Convention: the CCW. It then shows how ideational change, driven by transnational efforts to delegitimate the CCW, paved the way for a shift in discourse from control to disarmament that made the creation of a new institution possible. The article concludes by seeking to generalize from the CCW experience through a preliminary discussion of other ways and cases in which legitimacy might affect institutional replacement and persistence.