In 1939, E.H. Carr published The Twenty Years’ Crisis,[1] which argued that the world was divided into two camps: utopians and realists. Utopians like President Woodrow Wilson and his followers had made a mess of the world through their well-intentioned but naïve attempts at international cooperation. Realists were those, like Carr, who recognized that the…
Tag: international relations
Roundtable 10-30 on Face-to-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations
In this roundtable, four of international relations’ finest scholars evaluate Marcus Holmes’s Face-to-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations, a bold effort to bring research on brains to bear on questions of high-stakes summitry. While international relations scholars identify uncertainty, particularly the problem of judging the intentions of other states, as a central and essentially…
Article Review 100 on “Is International Relations a Global Discipline? Hegemony, Insularity, and Diversity in the Field”
Does the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) still reflect the dominance of U.S. approaches, universities, and scholars that have characterized it since the mid-twentieth century? Is IR becoming more global and diverse, or is it increasingly dividing into national approaches that may find it more difficult to talk to one another? This article by…
Roundtable 10-10 on Humiliation in International Relations: A Pathology of Contemporary International Systems
Bertrand Badie is one of France’s leading IR theorists; it is yet another mark of the fact that the discipline of international politics is not itself highly international that he is so little known in the United States. A personal confession may not be out of place: I would not have known of his work…
Review Essay 31 on National Identities and International Relations
Throughout the 1990s, the study of nationalism, and state and national identities gained momentum in the discipline of International Relations (IR). With the emergence of ethno-national claims across the globe and the dissolution of multinational states, authors sought to comprehend what drove national interests and behaviors both domestically and internationally. Recently, literature on identities and…
Roundtable on Explanation and Progress in Security Studies: Bridging Theoretical Divides in International Relations
Defining scientific progress in terms of the cumulation of knowledge, predictive power, and an “approach-to-consensus” regarding the best explanation when intellectual disputes arise, Fred Chernoff raises the critically important questions of why is there relatively little progress in the field of security studies as compared to the natural sciences, and why is there more progress…
Roundtable 8-10 on The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations
Barry Buzan and George Lawson have produced a book of grand scope that examines the multiple ways modernity has influenced the world and our theories about it. What they call the ‘global transformation’ brought about a shift from a polycentric world to a core-periphery order centered on the West. In the process, according to…
Forum 12 on “Special Issue: Traditions of British International Thought”
Over the last twenty years, interest in past thinkers and theories has grown, and the history of international thought has emerged to stand alongside the history of political thought. A series of studies of canonical thinkers,[2] schools of thought,[3] and key periods have appeared,[4] advancing our knowledge of past international thought. At the same time,…
Roundtable 7-19 on Knowing the Adversary: Leaders Intelligence and Assessment of Intentions in International Relations
How political leaders and their intelligence agencies assess the long-term intentions of their adversaries in international politics, how their assessments change in response to changes in the adversary’s capabilities or behavior, and the extent to which political leaders rely on their intelligence agencies are old questions in the study of international relations. The assessment of…
Roundtable 7-11 on the Congress of Vienna and dialogue between IR scholars and historians
This year marks the bicentennial anniversary of the Congress of Vienna. From September of 1814 to June of 1815, over 200 representatives met in the Austrian capital to rebuild the foundations of European diplomacy, which lay in shambles after over twenty years of war. It was the great powers, the “Pentarchy” of Austria, Britain, France,…
