Top Research Papers on International Relations

Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance Tareq Baconi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. $26.00. 368 pp. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical Shaul Magid. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. £30.00/£37.00. 296 pp. Zionism: An Emotional State Derek J. Penslar. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2023. $27.95. 284 pp. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison Ahmet T. Kuru. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. £26.99. 316 pp. Indigenous Contine...

1. Strategic History, 1800-2025: Themes and Contexts 2. Carl von Clausewitz and the Theory of War 3. From Limited War to National War: The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Way of War 4. The Nineteenth Century, I: A Strategic View 5. The Nineteenth Century, II: Technology, Warfare, and International Order 6. The Great War and the Invention of Modern Warfare, 1914-18 7. The Twenty-Year Armistice, 1919-1939 8. The Second World War in Europe, I: The Structure and Course of Total War 9. The Second World War in Europe, II: Understanding the War 10. The Second World War in Asia-Pacific, I: Politi...

It is concluded that though aspects of emerging digital approaches to making peace are promising, they cannot yet bypass or resolve older, analogue conflict dynamics revolving around power-relations, territorialism, and state formation.

This is both an exciting and fraught time in the study of gender and sexuality in global politics. On the one hand, feminist scholars build on more than 30 years of research in the field, with increasingly diverse scholars doing increasingly interdisciplinary research. On the other hand, crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and global inflation have shown that there are many sites of sharp, continuing gender inequities. In response to this combined excitement and challenge, this article addresses four areas of gender and IR research that are both enduring and growing: gender ...

The contributors to this volume are motivated by a common apprehension and a common hope. The apprehension was first voiced by Einstein, who lamented the inability of humanity, at the individual and social level, to keep up with the increased speed of technological change brought about by the quantum revolution. Before it was the atomic bomb. Today it is the advent of advanced quantum systems, which is already the object of intense geopolitical and commercial competition. Meanwhile, as quantum science and technology fast forward into the twenty-first century, the social sciences remain stuck i...

This article explores what it means to ‘animalise’ International Relations (IR). The posthuman move in the social sciences has involved the process of de-centring the human, replacing an anthropocentric focus with a view of the human as embedded within a complex network of inter-species relations. In a previous work we drew attention to the lack of analysis within International Relations of the key role played by more-than human animals in situations of conflict. The current COVID-19 pandemic again indicates that an analysis of international relations that does not have at its core an understa...

Based on extensive archival research, this book provides a new and stimulating history of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. Contrary to traditional accounts, it argues that IR was not invented by Anglo-American men after the First World War. Nor was it divided into neat theoretical camps. To appreciate the twists and turns of early IR scholarship, the book follows a diverse group of men and women from across Europe and beyond who pioneered the field since 1914. Like architects, they built a set of institutions (university departments, journals, libraries, etc.) but they a...

This book theorizes and problematizes the politics of vicarious identity in international relations, where vicarious identity refers to processes of “living through the other.” While prevalent and recognized in family and social settings, the presence and significance of vicarious identification in international relations has been overlooked. Vicarious identification offers the prospect of bolstering narratives of self-identity and appropriating a sense of reflected glory and enhanced self-esteem, but insofar as it may mask and be a response to emergent anxieties, inadequacies, and weaknesses ...

Political scientists are increasingly integrating wargames into their research. Either by fielding original games or by leveraging archival wargame materials, researchers can study rare events or topics where evidence is difficult to observe. However, scholars have little guidance on how to apply this novel methodological approach to political science research. This article evaluates how political scientists can use wargames as a method of scholarly inquiry and sets out to establish a research agenda for wargaming in International Relations. We first differentiate wargames from other methodolo...

This article is the part of the recent emotional turn when the scholars of social science are paying more attention to the study of collective emotions in international affairs. The former dominance of the biological and essentialist paradigms in this field were replaced by a number of culture-centered approaches based on social constructivism, which were elaborated within two pioneering disciplines – anthropology of emotions and history of emotions. The influence of such a scientific revolution included the key axis of the common – unique with an emphasis on the latter. The IR has been also a...

The study explores AI's role in international relations and religion, particularly Christianity, emphasizing its potential as an independent arbiter capable of recognizing cultural barriers and navigating political constraints.

ABSTRACT The article offers an interpretation of comparative education as an episteme that is entangled with international relations. It does so by seeking to extract past and present forms and patterns of comparative educational thought and action from the three main traditions of international relations, namely: realism, rationalism and revolutionism. It is specifically argued that each of these three traditions offers different understandings of the nature of international society and how its main actors conduct themselves in it. These different understandings of the nature of international...

This paper critically surveys recent developments in the subfield of Historical International Relations (IR). It looks at the evolution of Historical IR as a particular approach to the study of IR, and examines its development through competing approaches offered by contemporary scholars. The paper suggests that this subfield provides an insightful and innovative branch of scholarship in contemporary IR, which can pave the way to new futures of the discipline. In particular, the chapter explores in depth the various interactions between Historical IR and International Political Thought (IPT), ...

This essay presents the three main traditions of thinking about international relations in Western societies since the sixteenth century, with particular attention to the ‘middle ground’ between extremes. These extremes are typified by thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes at one pole, and Kant and Wilson at the other. The via media is associated with the development of constitutional government and the rule of law, as represented by thinkers such as Grotius and Gladstone. The essay illustrates the differences among these three traditions by analysing their distinct positions concerning inte...

The imagination is at the heart of what it means to be human. For this reason, it has been the subject of close examination across time and locale. Yet, while international relations (IR) researchers often mobilize the term rhetorically, its character and operations remain underconceptualized in the discipline and disconnected from the rich literatures that explore this vital faculty. This article identifies a commonsense account of the imagination in IR's most pervasive discourse on order and anarchy. Taking its cues from the Hobbesian tradition, here a distinctly monological imagination is...

Preface Understanding China's Political System U.S.-China Relations: Policy Issues China-U.S. Relations: Current Issues & Implications for U.S. Policy U.S.-China Counter-terrorism Co-operation: Issues for U.S. Policy China-North Korea Relations China-U.S. Trade Issues The Rise of China's Auto Industry & its Impact on the U.S. Motor Vehicle Industry China-U.S. Poultry Dispute China: Country Analysis Briefs Index.

There has been a proliferation of works on informal dimensions of international relations. Putting the scholarship under the banner of informal international relations (IIR), [A1] the value preposition of research and publications on informal aspects of international political life is critically explored in order to chart promising pathways to further research in this growing field of study. Three generations of IIR scholarship may be identified. The first-generation scholarship took the IIR approach without explicitly acknowledging it. The second-generation scholars treated it primarily as an...

This is an eight-page reflection piece on gatekeeping in IR knowledge production and the politics that goes into presenting national racial contestations as issues unworthy of international study and consideration. Premised on a personal experience of scholastic rejection, this commentary is a reflective intervention concerning the state of the field and the imperial connotations of methodological disciplinarity – the process in which IR research is restricted within disciplinary borders because of scholastic endeavours to keep the discipline pure. Here, using anti-imperial thought, I press fo...

Buzan and Acharya challenge the discipline of International Relations to reimagine itself in the light of the thinking about, and practice of, international relations and world order from premodern India, China and the Islamic world. This prequel to their 2019 book, The Making of Global International Relations, takes the story back from the two-century tale of modern IR, to reveal the deep global history of the discipline. It shows the multiple origins and meanings of many concepts thought of as only modern and Western. It opens pathways for the rest of the world into this most Eurocentric of ...

Developing an original theoretical approach to understanding the roots of regional conflict and cooperation, International Relations in the Middle East explores domestic and international foreign policy dynamics for an accessible insight into how and why Middle Eastern regional order has changed over time. Highlighting interactions between foreign policy trajectories in a range of states including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey, Ewan Stein identifies two main drivers of foreign policy and alignments: competitive support-seeking and ideological externalisation. Clearl...

Gender and International SecurityTheories of International Politics and ZombiesTransdisciplinary Feminist ResearchBananas, Beaches and BasesFeminist International RelationsFeminist Perspectives on Law and TheoryA Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and ShadeFeminist Security StudiesGender Matters in Global PoliticsComing to TermsWorlding WomenThe Curious FeministAn Anthropology of the Qur’anMainstreaming PoliticsFeminist International RelationsRoutledge Handbook of Ethics and International RelationsFeminist Methodologies for International RelationsNaming a Transnational Black Feminist ...

Abstract The article explores the Legon School of International Relations (LSIR) which is the research, teaching, and academic programming of International Relations (IR) at the University of Ghana, Legon. The LSIR came out of attempts to decolonise knowledge production, dissemination, and academic programing in Ghana in early 1960s. The article shows that the LSIR is decolonial in theoretical perspective, grounded in southern epistemologies, relational in ontology, qualitative in methodology, practice-based, and it is equity-oriented. Although the LSIR scholarship as a package is distinctive,...

ABSTRACT That Indigenous diplomacies remain largely unknown to states and to disciplinary International Relations is, ultimately, a matter of choices made by those privileged in terms of the power to (re)produce social facts and common senses. Distinguishing distinct faces of ‘not knowing’ exposes ontological commitments underwriting the logics of territorially exclusive sovereign power and the knowledge practices of International Relations that, in both spheres, make Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world seem implausible. ‘Not knowing’ in this sense is a form of rejection of knowl...

Brian Rathbun argues against the prevailing wisdom on morality in international relations, both the commonly held belief that foreign affairs is an amoral realm and the opposing concept that norms have gradually civilized an unethical world. By focusing on how states respond to being wronged rather than when they do right, Rathbun shows that morality is and always has been virtually everywhere in international relations – in the perception of threat, the persistence of conflict, the judgment of domestic audiences, and the articulation of expansionist goals. The inescapability of our moral impu...

The development of the theory of geocultural technologies is an attempt to integrate various theories and practices of foreign policy cultural activities of states on the world stage within the framework of a generalizing scientific vision, as well as to rethink international relations on the basis of geographical and cultural determinism, as well as the technological approach. The constitutive basis of the theory of geocultural technologies in international relations is the idea that the subordination of social actors to power is determined by its cultural attractiveness for them and lea...

How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the institutional preferences and bargaining strategies of national governments. The author argues that Europe’s foremost regional organization systematically affects institution building abroad, but that such influence varies across different types of or...

Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations, by William A. Callahan, explores the newer dimensions of world-ordering theories. The author approaches these theories in a pragmatic way to engage with enmeshed social practices. The mutual exchanges of multisensory experiences give meaning and value to performatives such as garden-building or film-making. The book meanders through a nonlinear, nonverbal, and nonnormative mode, rather than a naïve West-to-East or Right-to-Left analysis. Callahan shies away from a mere Eurocentric analysis of ‘visual IR’ and tries to incorporate methods o...

It is time for International Relations (IR) to join the relational revolution afoot in the natural and social sciences. To do so, more careful reflection is needed on cosmological assumptions in the sciences and also in the study and practice of international relations. In particular it is argued here that we need to pay careful attention to whether and how we think ‘relationally’. Building a conversation between relational cosmology, developed in the natural sciences, and critical social theory, this book seeks to develop a new perspective on how to think relationally in and around the study ...

This study emphasizes the importance of culture and identity in international relations, highlighting challenges that arise from cross-cultural communication. It underscores the significance of recognizing and embracing cultural diversity and the need for cultural competence, sensitivity and awareness of biases in policymaking to cultivate positive and productive international relationships. The potential for cultural differences to lead to conflicts is also highlighted, which underscores the importance of cultural competence and sensitivity in communication. Individual and national identities...

Abstract Drawing on my qualitative and quantitative research I show that the motives for war have changed in the course of the last four centuries, and that the causes of war and the responses of others to the use of force are shaped by society. Leaders who start wars rarely behave with the substantive and instrumental rationality assumed by realist and rationalist approaches. For this reason, historically they lose more than half wars than they start. After 1945, the frequency of failure rises to over 80 percent. Rationalists allow for miscalculation but attribute it to lack of information. I...

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the development of the modern world through the concept of Jacobinism. It argues that the French Revolution was not just another step in the construction of capitalist modernity, but produced an alternative (geo)political economy – that is, 'Jacobinism.' Furthermore, Jacobinism provided a blueprint for other modernization projects, thereby profoundly impacting the content and tempo of global modernity in and beyond Europe. The book traces the journey of Jacobinism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. It contends that until the 1950s, the Ottoman/Turk...

Recognition in general comes in many flavours, and so do desires and hopes for recognition. The same is true of recognition of agency in particular. In this short text, I will engage in some basic conceptual work that could be useful for thinking about the theme of this special issue. I will, first, distinguish between several forms of agency that matter in international relations (though not only there) and that can be either recognised or remain unrecognised. Second, I will reflect on what exactly it may mean to ‘recognise’ agency of these various kinds. Finally, I will discuss possible uses...

This article revisits the debate on the role of ethnography in International Relations. It primarily does this by elucidating three points of tension in the literature on ethnography in International Relations. Firstly, it tackles the challenges related to ‘getting on’ with ethnography after the reflexive methodological developments that have taken place within anthropology since the 1980s. Secondly, it investigates how to overcome certain matters of scale and how to conceptualise the ‘international’ methodologically, or more specifically, ethnographically. When looking at issues that somehow ...

Abstract While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to...

Islam emphasizes the protection of human dignity and respect for each individual as a result of true humanity. In the Islamic view, society is united under one legal system from the Koran and Sunnah. Islamic legal experts agree that Muslims are united, regardless of differences in territory or position. Islamic law embraces all humanity without discrimination. This research highlights the study of Islam in international relations, emphasizing that Islam is not a collection of separate ideas but a cohesive system rooted in profound principles. The research methodology includes historical and co...

Tracing constructivist work on culture, identity and norms within the historical, geographical and professional contexts of world politics, this book makes the case for new constructivist approaches to international relations scholarship.

Scholarship on the politics of secrecy in international relations and foreign policy has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. This article begins by providing an overview of this literatu...

Trade statistics are widely used in studies and policymaking focused on economic interdependence. Yet, researchers in International Relations (IR) have largely disregarded half the data available to study trade. Bilateral trade flows are usually recorded twice: by the sending economy as an export and by the receiving one as an import. These two values should match, but discrepancies between them tend to be large and pervasive. Most studies ignore this issue, which we label the “mirror problem” for short, by using only one entry. However, it is not self-evident which one is consistently most ...

Uncertainty about military power is widely considered an important determinant of international conflict, but research in international relations provides relatively little guidance about the origins of uncertainty. What factors influence the validity of actors’ assessments of military capabilities? When would one expect uncertainty about military capabilities to be particularly high, or especially low? We examine a series of factors capable of explaining the sources of uncertainty in international relations, positing that the uncertainty of assessments is a function of both characteristics ...

The purpose of the article is to develop a definition of the concept of “force” as atool for applied analysis of modern world political problems based on materialistic theoretical andmethodological approaches. At the beginning of the 21st century, the concept of “soft power”became so widespread in international politics that it became more and more relevant ininternational relations, especially in the West, especially in the United States in the newmillennium. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were processes in the world that led tochanges in the balance of power and geopolitical i...

Building on the recent initiative to truly globalise the field of International Relations, this book provides an innovative interrogation of regionalism.

Abstract Global IR is an encompassing term for a range of work that has set out to globalize the discipline in terms of its core concepts, assumptions, and substantive areas of study. Our symposium supports Global IR's goals but also offers some friendly critiques of the project with the aim of increasing its impact and durability. In this Introduction to the symposium, we posit that Global IR is vulnerable to a dynamic that limits its capacity to upend the status quo, which we term the ‘essentialism trap’. Essentialism captures a range of commitments oriented around the notion that the world ...

Disciplinary International Relations (IR) grew in part out of the discipline of History. Even so, the subfield of Historical International Relations (HIR) is a relatively new one. In this introduction, the authors start by presenting the overall trajectory of historical work in the IR discipline, how it was central to the founding of scholarly IR but was somewhat marginalised during the Cold War, and how it has had a gradual resurgence since the 1980s, gaining steam around the turn of the century. As detailed in recent IR historiography, the Anglo-American discipline of IR grew out of a number...

What do we mean by theory in international relations? What kinds of knowledge do theories seek? How do they stipulate it is found? How should we evaluate any resulting knowledge claims? What do answers to these questions tell us about the theory project in IR, and in the social sciences more generally? Lebow explores these questions in a critical evaluation of the positivist and interpretivist epistemologies. He identifies tensions and problems specific to each epistemology, and some shared by both, and suggests possible responses. By exploring the relationship between the foundations of theor...

Global politics is exceedingly soulful, but the field of international relations (IR) astonishingly soulless. The world order is undergoing tectonic shifts: the “Western” unipolar moment is receding, China is rising, and geographies of “(Afro-)EurAsia” and the “Indo-Pacific” are emerging. To align with such shifts and remap the international geography, global actors are increasingly (re)producing narratives of civilizational “souls.” Putin views Ukraine as part of the “Russian world,” imbued with the “Russian soul.” Xi's “Thought,” instilled in China's schools and constitution, intends to “e...

AFP. (2017, 08 29). Macron calls for multi-speed Europe. Retrieved 04 04, 2022, from France24: https://www. france24.com/en/20170829-macron-calls-multi-speed-europe Camară, G., 2019. “Talent abroad: A review of Romanian emigrants.”Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 19 (4): 648–50. 10.1080/14683857.2019.1681664 Gonzalez,R., B. Mackenna, and E. Muñoz. 2019. “The experience and perception of corruption: A comparative study in 34 societies.”International Journal of Sociology 49 (3). doi:10.1080/00207659.2019.1605030 Melgar, N., M. Rossi, and T.W. Smith. 2010. “The Perception of Corruption.”I...

If international relations can be theorised as ‘inter-textual’, then why not also – or indeed better – as ‘inter-carbonic’? For, not only is the modern history of carbon to a large degree international; in addition, many of the key historical junctures and defining features of modern international politics are grounded in carbon or, more precisely, in the various socio-ecological practices and processes through which carbon has been exploited and deposited, mobilised and represented, recycled and transformed. In what follows I seek to make this case, arguing that carbon and international relat...

During recent years the modern World Economy has undergone colossal changes, which were influenced not only by unexpected situations like a pandemic, but also by various factors and trends. The research is intended to make an attempt for considering the long-established trends in international economic relations in a new aspect of current events and economic integration and the overall economic integration of the labour, industries and capital. Now, in the context of a global pandemic, all states and entire regions are subject to integration. Thus, the purpose of the article is to determine th...

Quantitative empirical inquiry in international relations often relies on dyadic data. Standard analytic techniques do not account for the fact that dyads are not generally independent of one another. That is, when dyads share a constituent member (e.g., a common country), they may be statistically dependent, or “clustered.” Recent work has developed dyadic clustering robust standard errors (DCRSEs) that account for this dependence. Using these DCRSEs, we reanalyzed all empirical articles published in International Organization between January 2014 and January 2020 that feature dyadic data. ...

Bieler and Morton’s Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis makes an important and timely contribution to the academic study of the international political economy.1 Based on the philosophy of internal relations, the book seeks to challenge the ‘ontological exteriority’ that is typically posited between key elements of the international system, such as ideas, the social relations of production, the workplace, the ‘social factory’, and the market, state and inter-state system. While the authors draw on a range of theoretical resources and approaches, it is the historical materialism of Ant...