International Relations Theorization Research Articles

The Use and Misuse of East Asian History in IR Theorizing

Abstract The past two decades have witnessed a wave of research into the history of East Asian international relations (IR). Scholars seek to broaden the historical frames of reference in IR for both theory testing and theory generation. The article reviews this recent trend, examining its limitations and exploring future agenda. In studying historical East Asian IR, scholars have different expectations regarding whether their research would support, complement, or undermine mainstream Western IR. The spatial and temporal scope of their historical inquiries, as well as theoretical ambitions, therefore, differ significantly. Scholars no longer treat all East Asian history as simply one case, but as multiple cases with divergent patterns, and they recognize that the system consisted not solely of China but of multiple actors. In addition to contrasting East Asia with Western Europe, they explore also the similarities between East Asia and other non-Western regions. To advance the agenda, however, scholars must scrupulously navigate three tensions. They are: the tension between the “East” and “West”; the tension between the two disciplines of history and IR; and the tension between past and present. Future studies, therefore, must broaden their horizons in order to better transcend ethnocentrism and exceptionalism, refine their methodology both to avoid selection bias and conduct more sophisticated comparisons, and to maintain a proper distance from contemporary politics. Most importantly, they should combine high-quality historical research with cutting-edge IR theoretical trends to construct dynamic theories that could be applied to other regions.

Turning towards practices: on the common ground of international relations and European studies

AbstractThe so-called practice turn in International Relations (IR) has established a new paradigm that puts practitioners' quotidian doings front and centre of IR theorizing. It is proving to be an influential development also for area studies (AS) that share much of IR's scholarship and objects of study. This is certainly the case for European studies (ES) where the works of International Practice Theory (IPT) scholars has greatly contributed to raise attention to situated, mundane, and everyday practices of EU institutions. This article reviews the contribution of IPT scholars to ES to assess the added value of this research agenda and its potential to become a ‘trading zone’ where IR and ES/AS scholars can advance understanding of how the local and the global connect. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the extant literature: (1) finding ways to theorize and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practices to EU-wide doings (generalization challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). The article ends by calling for a global practice theory as a way to tackle these two challenges.

Towards global relational theorizing: a dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relationalism

What is ‘relational theorizing’ in International Relations and what can it offer? This article introduces a thematic section that responds to these questions by showing two things. First, relational theorizing is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of analyses that begin with relations rather than the putative essences of constitutively autonomous actors. Second, relational theorizing has emerged from different geo-linguistic traditions, and a relational approach to International Relations (IR) can offer the language and space for increased and productive engagement beyond Anglophone scholarship. This thematic section takes a significant step in this direction by staging a dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relational IR theorizing. Such an engagement shows points of comparison and contrast, convergence and divergence. In this way, the essays presented here contribute to developing a more ‘global’ IR.

Is Strategic Studies Rationalist, Materialist, and A-Critical? Reconnecting Security and Strategy

AbstractBetween the 1940s and the 1960s, strategy was at the heart of security studies and closely intertwined with International Relations (IR). Over the past three decades, however, the study of strategy has been relegated to a secondary position in the international security subfield and marginalized in IR theorizing. One important source of this disconnect is the challenge mounted by critical security advocates, who sought to reorient the study of security away from strategic studies. They reached into the philosophy of science and pulled out three familiar dichotomies, rationalism/constructivism, materialism/idealism, and problem-solving/critical theorizing, that they could utilize within security debates. Specifically, they argue that strategic studies leaves out too much of what is really important for security and world politics because it is rationalist, materialist, and retains an uncritical view of knowledge production. In this article, I turn the critical security conventional wisdom on its head and show that strategic studies, exemplified by the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz and Thomas Schelling, actually transcends these dichotomies and hence offers an indispensable source of insights for both security studies and IR.

Transcending Hegemonic International Relations Theorization: Nothingness, Re-Worlding, and Balance of Relationship

The manuscript compares the World History Standpoint promoted by the Kyoto School of Philosophy with two other competitors – post-Western reworlding and the Chinese balance of relationships - in their shared campaign for alternative international relations theory. The World History Standpoint explains how nations influenced by major power politics judge their conditions and rely on combining existing cultural resources to make sense of their place in world politics. It predicts that international systemic stability cannot be maintained over a set of congruent identities because history’s longevity allows for previous politically incorrect identities to return in due time with proper clues. It specifically predicts that nations caught between different identities will experience cycles in their international relations; nations with an expansive scope of international relations or declining from the hegemonic status will adopt balance of relationships; and less influential nations will practically reinterpret hegemonic order to meet their otherwise inexpressible motivations. Accordingly, Japan will be focused upon as an exemplary case for World History Standpoint; Taiwan for re-worlding; and China for balance of relationships. The paper touches upon theoretical implications of their conflicts.

Diplomacy after Policymaking: Theorizing Hyper-Empowered Individuals

Diplomatic Afterlives. Edited by Andrew F Cooper. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015. 206 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6199-5). The academic study of diplomacy in the discipline of International Relations (IR) has flourished in recent years (see Sending, Pouliot, and Neumann ⇓; Pouliot and Cornut ⇓ for recent volumes that include substantive reviews of the recent diplomacy renaissance). After decades of discounting diplomacy's importance in favor of structural explanations (Rathbun ⇓:1), diplomacy has (re)-emerged on the landscape of mainstream IR theorizing. One reason for this is the growing recognition that states spend so much time engaging in diplomacy, it must be for a good reason (if we assume that states take purposeful actions). More important is the growing sense that structural features beyond the control of individuals, such as power, do not account for the tremendous variation we see in political outcomes in the international system. In order to make sense of this variation, we need a theory of agency, an understanding of how individual agents can affect outcomes independent of other structural factors. Several works in the last few years have attempted to construct theories of diplomacy as theories of agency. Rathbun's (⇓) Diplomacy's Value: Creating Security in 1920s Europe and the Contemporary Middle East is an exemplar. Rathbun sets out discrete propositions about how diplomatic styles and diplomat characteristics, particularly prosocial vs. proself orientations, combine to help explain the Locarno period in Europe. Yarhi-Milo's (⇓) Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations demonstrates that policymakers often make decisions about the intentions of states not just by looking at structural factors, but instead by relying on preexisting beliefs and …

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There are two contradictory narratives those enframe the contemporary development of International Relations (IR) theory. As the absence and discontinuity of the so-called “inter-paradigm debates”, the first narrative enframes the contemporary development of IR theory is moving toward its end. On the contrary, the other narrative celebrates the plurality of theoretical development in contemporary IR, and letting “a thousand theoretical flowers bloom”. This article seeks to reveal that both of these narratives are problematic. The main problem of the first narrative lies in the “debatism” approach as the basis of its historiography. This article shows how the “debatism” approach misrepresents the history of IR theorization. Meanwhile, the second narrative is problematic as well, since the celebration of theoretical plurality tends to neglect the philosophical foundations and concentrate on the technical side of theorization. Drawing on Fred Chernoff’s steps of IR theorization, this article proposes a new frame of IR theorization in order to leave behind the problematic “debatism” approach, while proliferate “a thousand of theoretical flowers bloom” without neglecting the importance of philosophical foundations in IR theorization.

An Emerging China and Diasporic Chinese: historicity, state, and international relations

The past decade has seen a growing body of literature on the (re)emergence of China and its implications for the new international order, and this scholarship is accompanied by the attempts from both within and outside of China to establish Chinese schools of international relations (IR). These admirable efforts, however, have been largely state-centric and concerned mainly with the balance of power, with little attention being directed to the diaspora's role in the evolution of China's international relationship and their potential contribution to bridging China studies and international relations theorization. Drawing upon theoretical insights from both IR and diaspora studies and employing a wide range of primary data including archives and personal interviews, this essay examines the diaspora's role (or the lack of it) in China's diplomacy since 1949 and attempts to conceptualize the Chinese experience in an historical and comparative perspective. I argue that historicity and state have played a significant part in shaping the interactions between the diaspora and diplomacy. The Chinese state's resilient capacity in domesticating (potential) diplomatic problems with respect to the diaspora and transforming them into new policy initiatives through facilitating diasporic participation in China's socio-economic and political processes has opened up new venues for the Chinese overseas to be involved in China's diplomacy. This article concludes by considering three different routes in engaging the diaspora with diplomacy at a time of China rising and by calling for strategic integration of diaspora into the emerging discourses on ‘IR theories with Chinese characteristics’.

Interdisciplinary Dialogue in Goodman and Jinks’ Socializing States

Goodman and Jinks’ forthcoming book, Socializing States, is a tour de force of international relations (IR) theorizing. The authors’ revised tripartite scheme of socialization mechanisms, their sophisticated theorizing of an “acculturation” mechanism, and their firm grounding in the sociological and psychological literatures set a standard of excellence as much for IR theorizing. The comments in this paper therefore focus on the authors’ empirical claims about the existing evidence for state socialization, and on the legal aspects of their analysis. The paper is organized in five parts. The first section discusses the relationship of the book to contemporary IR theory, focusing on the authors’ value-added contribution and encouraging them to make the links between their own work and existing IR scholarship a bit more transparent. In the second section, I move from theory to empirics, suggesting that recent IR scholarship is more equivocal about international socialization of state actors than the authors suggest. The third section moves from IR to IL, asking what is specifically legal in the authors’ analysis and in their hypothesized socialization mechanisms. Section four inquires briefly into the question of “how international law comes home,” asking questions about the domestic-level mechanisms and especially the agents of socialization in domestic legal systems. A fifth and final section very briefly discusses issues of regime design, noting the sharp differences between the mechanism-based guidelines of this book and the situation-structural approach of other studies in IL and IR.

Review of a Perspective: Subaltern Realism

For over two decades, Mohammed Ayoob has been engaged in an intellectual endeavor that aims to give scholars a feasible analytical tool to use in grasping the major determinants of Third World state behavior, the dominant concerns of Third World state elites, and the root causes of conflict in the Third World. While trying to answer questions of war and peace - what outsiders really want from international relations (IR) - Ayoob tries to make the voice of the Third World heard in mainstream IR theory. Ayoob began his theoretical journey by emphasizing the divergence of Third World conditions from those of industrialized core states, and has gone on to criticize mainstream IR theory for excluding the Third World. Ayoob proposes an alternative conceptualization of security with new sets of questions and variables in order to incorporate the Third World into mainstream IR theory. This article reviews Ayoob's perspective from its initial emergence in the early 1980s as a special emphasis on Third World conditions, to its development into the full-fledged perspective of 'Subaltern Realism' in the mid-1990s, in which he emphasizes the inequality in IR theorizing. Criticisms of his 'Subaltern Realism' perspective will be mentioned at the end of the study.