Search Results

This chapter develops the themes of the book along the lines discussed above: its goals, and the key concepts it advances to achieve them. It sets out the longstanding challenge of sustainable critique in light of the problem of reification. It also surveys the effects of reification across eight decades of IR scholarship, framing and summarizing the case studies undertaken in Chapters 3-5.

This chapter shows that current IR (International Relations) theorizing finds liberal order a difficult topic. It confirms the concern voiced at the beginning of the volume that the IR academy in its use of liberalism as a label for theorizing the international has at once endowed liberal internationalism with more idealism than it can rightfully claim whilst at the same time has shorn liberalism of its normative and value-based foundations. It suggests that, paradoxically, when going back to ‘liberal basics’, some versions of realism are in fact based upon a specific vision of politics, which gives rise to liberal order. Liberal orders are not, and cannot be based on an ahistorical ‘view from nowhere’, but have to face an ever-changing historical setting. As result the philosophy cannot provide a final foundation, but nor can liberals — or for that matter realists — do without it.

Why is reification so resilient, and critique so difficult to sustain? Developing a critique of knowledge with its roots in Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, this chapter shows the depth of the problem in conceptual-philosophical terms and sketches a conceptual path for meeting it.

This chapter returns to the concept of affordances introduced in chapter 1. It proceeds in the spirit of thinking through theoretical approaches’ affordances to ask how specific critical theories and constructivisms might inform each other in the absence of a broader constructivist–critical theory synthesis. It does so in two parts. The first looks at examples of specific overlaps in which the affordances of a particular constructivism serve the needs of a particular exercise in critical theory, or vice-versa. It demonstrates that, while there are approaches that do not afford overlap, there are also approaches that do afford overlap. The second part argues that a politics and an ontology are not strictly analogous; the scope for constructivist tools in critical research is in fact narrower than the scope for critical reading of constructivist research.

This chapter introduces the challenge of rethinking international relations and the field of International Relations as it embarks on its ‘second century’ of scholarship. It considers the varied criticisms of the field, in particular its inability to deal with questions of environmental degradation and planetary co-existence. In this context the chapter introduces why we should be interested in cosmology and relational cosmology in particular as we tackle these challenges. The chapter also introduces puzzles, and doubts, which may concern the reader as they start their engagement with cosmology as well as existing literatures tackling relevant puzzle-fields, such as literatures on new materialism, relationality, and new ways of thinking IR.

There is much more to Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, and his impact on international relations ([IR] and IR theory) has been deeper and more profound than has been commonly acknowledged. Indeed, Niebuhr has been a seminal figure in the Realist movement, but his impact goes beyond Realism. This chapter documents his contributions in the context of the revival/recovery of classical Realism, along with a recognition of the importance of nonmaterial factors (with contemporary interpretivists and constructivists), regime type (as with neo-liberal institutionalists or democratic peace), and human nature (Rosen), among other things. There are deep strains of existentialism in Niebuhr’s work as well, which is usually associated with postmodernism/poststructuralism, as Niebuhr draws in important ways from Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. This chapter reconsiders Niebuhr’s theoretical innovations and in the process more adequately and systematically locates his work in IR theory, considering both his influences and the influences he has had therein and thereupon.

This chapter argues for an extension of how we think relationally via relational cosmology. It places relational cosmology in a conversation with varied relational perspectives in critical social theory and argues that specific kinds of extensions and dialogues emerge from this perspective. In particular, a conversation on how to think relationality without fixing its meaning is advanced. This chapter also discusses in detail how to extend beyond discussion of ‘human’ relationalities towards comprehending the wider ‘mesh’ of relations that matter but are hard to capture for situated knowers in the social sciences and IR. This key chapter seeks to provide the basis for a translation between relational cosmology, critical social theory, critical humanism and International Relations theory.

This chapter extends the arguments developed in the previous chapters into a conversation with recent International Relations scholarship. First, the chapter argues against the notions of the international and the global as key conceptual tropes in the field, suggesting that there are important reasons to develop the notion of planetarity for the field. Through it we perceive aspects of political life and negotiation with relationalities which we do not via classical IR notions. However, the chapter also critically interrogates existing attempts to develop planet politics and planetarity, suggesting some ways forward. The chapter then explores the meaning of democracy and politics in a planetary politics setting, exploring an example around fisheries.

This chapter summarises the arguments of the book and discusses their wider implications for, in particular, the historiography of International Relations (IR), contemporary liberal IR theory and British intellectual history of the period. Liberal internationalism enjoys a position in the current theoretical landscape of IR as opaque as that which it occupies in real-world political practice. The liberal internationalist vision is at once pervasive, ignored and exploited. Diversity in unity is a central characteristic of liberal internationalist ideology from the late nineteenth century through to the inter-war years. The history of internationalist ideas provides a marked contrast to the technical and bloodless versions of liberalism that are predominant in contemporary American IR. Liberal internationalism clearly had many drawbacks, including an unwarranted faith in gradual or manufactured progress and a complacent attitude towards the achievements of civilisation.

This chapter begins by outlining the conceptions of rules, institutions, and social practices employed throughout the book. It demonstrates that attention to procedural rules for rule-making and interpretation, or secondary rules, sheds light on the puzzle of how actors know how and when to engage in particular forms of social construction and therefore on why we observe patterned practices of global rule-making. Secondary rules shape the way actors present and evaluate proposals for making, changing, and interpreting rules. As such, they are a key overlooked cause of the form, process, and timing of change in the rules and institutions of the international system. They also help explain the success or failure of particular attempts to create such change, since proposals presented according to relevant secondary rules are more likely to be accepted. Finally, the chapter outlines the book’s significance and contributions, and discusses issues of method and evidence.

This chapter summarizes the aims and conclusions of the work. In addition, this concluding chapter sets out five ‘light’ challenges, and related propositions, for development of IR theory, propositions reflective of the sensibility relational cosmology, as translated here via critical humanism, might direct us to adopt. Many challenges remain, but we should not feel weighed down by them but explore new ways of thinking, being, and becoming as we ‘loosen’ ourselves into the ‘mesh’ and the complex negotiations of human and non-human relations residing there requires. IR of the future will likely be more open, more interdisciplinary, and hopefully more cosmologically aware, and it has the opportunity to develop new ways of thinking and doing co-existence and politics.

This chapter argues that constructivist identity theory has not been tested in large-n quantitative work, not because constructivism is incompatible with such tests, but because an intersubjective data set has never been created. Instead, the chapter shows that existing quantitative work reduces identity to single measures of language, religion, or ethnicity that do not capture the intersubjective content of national identities. The chapter reviews constructivist contributions to IR theory to make the case that testing constructivism with appropriate data is important because identity is an alternative explanation for war, peace, cooperation, and conflict. Finally, the chapter explores how national identity might contribute to a more comprehensive theory of international hegemony with relevance for international politics today.

The chapter recapitulates the norm appropriation by the Indonesian foreign policy community. Most stakeholders localized external ideas and norms. In the process, the government was exposed to localization pressures by nonstate actors from below. Legislators and business representatives mainly drew from extant beliefs, while in their majority NGOs, academics, and the press vocally propagated the European ideas of regional integration. By charting additional pathways of norm diffusion and distinguishing defensive and offensive localization, the study nuanced existing norm diffusion theory. Indonesian foreign policy stakeholders also imported ideas from Africa and Latin America, making norm diffusion an omnidirectional process. The study provides strong evidence that ASEAN’s cooperation norms continue to differ from the EU. Highlighting the normative agency of Indonesian foreign policy stakeholders, the study contributes to the project of a Global IR, which more than hitherto takes into account events and processes in the Global South.

This chapter posits that understanding the determinants of US policy for the region is vital for theorizing South Asian security. It argues that structural realist explanations do not adequately capture post–Cold War security dynamics or US policy in South Asia, and that a more fine-tuned approach sensitive to domestic and bureaucratic politics in the United States and in both India and Pakistan is necessary. Tracing the US foreign policy towards India and Pakistan from the latter part of the Clinton administration to the administration of George W. Bush, if focuses on: factors/variables affecting the formulation of US policy towards India and Pakistan in the post–Cold War period, the impact of domestic variables on foreign policy, and the interactive nature of domestic and external interests that aids the definition of the situation, enabling the decision-maker to act. This study examines patterns of interaction among the various actors that led to a re-appraisal of US policy towards Indian and Pakistan. This chapter argues that, in foreign policy analysis, policy behaviour is the product of individuals acting in the name of the state.

The chapter presents the book’s theoretical framework, which is grounded in a sociological approach to international relations (IR) theory. It suggests that to explain the causes and shape of the operationalization of religion in US foreign policy attention needs to be paid to the combined effects of macro-level forces represented by the emergence of a postsecular world society, and the mobilization at the micro-level of a diverse range of desecularizing actors who seek to contest the secularity of American foreign policy through the deployment of multiple desecularizing discourses. The chapter then conceptualizes four different processes of foreign policy desecularization—institutional, epistemic, ideological, and state-normative—which take place as religion increasingly becomes an organized subject and object of US foreign policy. Finally, it advances three hypotheses about the global effects of America’s religious foreign policies: they shape religious landscapes around the world in ways that reflect American values and interests; they contribute to religionizing world politics; and they promote similar policies internationally.

Chapter 3 (“A Theory of Exclusion”) develops the primary theoretical argument of the book. In brief, it argues that actors seek to enact order principles to target and weaken entities they believe threaten their future security and enduring primacy. The larger and more immediate the threat, the more likely dominant actors are to pursue significant change to foundational order principles. The chapter first details this core logic of the ordering-to-exclude theory before developing important extensions of and refinements to the argument. Second, it introduces three viable alternative explanations for dominant actor order preferences and deduces testable hypotheses for each that can be evaluated alongside and against ordering-to-exclude theory. Finally, it discusses the research methods that inform the subsequent empirical chapters of the book and previews the structure that each of the nine case studies will take.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main argument of the book concerning the nature and operation of social practices of rule-making and reviews the main findings from the four empirical cases. It then discusses the book’s significance. It sheds light on how to resolve comparability issues and investigate scope conditions among various proposed mechanisms for creating shared knowledge such as rules and institutions. It extends the range of applications of the practice-turn to the practice of rule-making, and identifies synergies between rule and practice constructivisms. It also demonstrates that the study of social practices of rule-making improves existing explanations of change in international systems. In doing so, it highlights the importance of these practices to contemporary global governance, as well as the overlooked importance of global governance for the study of international systems and world orders. Finally, it demonstrates the book’s utility for studying hierarchy and authority in world politics.

This chapter questions standard interpretations of the interwar period as one of failed utopianism. It demonstrates that the Locarno agreements and especially the Kellogg-Briand Pact were part of a larger rule system originating in the late nineteenth century that sought to curtail the state’s right to use force. In particular, it shows that secondary rules can create unintended outcomes. Neither Kellogg nor Briand sought to create a multilateral treaty banning war except in self-defense and collective security. Rather, in seeking to manipulate procedural rules to force each other into abandoning the treaty, both men came to genuinely embrace it. This norm clearly informed subsequent state practice, despite being imperfectly adhered to, and was reasserted in the UN Charter. The case also shows the robustness of social practices of rule-making, which were adhered to consistently even by new states like Japan and states like the Soviet Union that had renounced international institutions.