The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live. By Michael Dillon, Julian Reid. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 208 pp., $41.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-95300-9). Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds. By Anna M. Agathangelou, L.H.M. Ling. New York: Routledge, 2009. 208 pp., $35.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77280-8). Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays. By James Der Derian. New York: Routledge, 2008. 316 pp., $44.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-77241-9). Critical theoretic work has long occupied a curious place in the short disciplinary history of international relations (IR). On the one hand, its proponents have complained—by and large with a very reasonable degree of justification—about its marginalization, underlined not least by the all too often crude, ill-informed, and rather placated dismissals by the mainstream. On the other hand, however, much of the range of critical theoretic conceptual, methodological and analytical inventories has quite profoundly shaped the disciplinary conversation. The recent entrenchment of constructivism—pace its heterogeneity—as a central disciplinary research framework is, viewed in this context, in the broadest sense an indication of just how sustained a challenge “reflectivism” turned out to be for the main contenders in what has sometimes been called the inter-paradigm debate. To some extent, this perhaps unexpected efficacy can be understood better, when the formative moves of constructivism's arrival are taken into account. Critical theoretic scholarship, then, performed the prominent function of keeping IR as a disciplinary conversation in touch with philosophical, theoretical, and methodological debates in cogent disciplines. This function has, in fact, been frequently acknowledged, not least by proponents of the “normalization” of IR as a distinct and epistemically autonomous realm of social scientific concern. Hand in hand with such meanwhile commonplace acknowledgements of critical theories’ formative contributions go, however, the equally commonplace, almost mantric incantations regarding their short-comings. Setting aside more ill-tempered tropes (such as the oft invoked avowed charges of obscurantism, obsequiousness, or faddish theoreticism), such admonishments by and large converge around the notion that critical theorists fail to deliver when it comes to substantive contributions to knowledge about international, or world politics. Irrespective of which particular ideals of social scientific propriety are embraced by those asking critical IR scholars for “the beef,” there is little doubt on their part that the …