Rising great powers want others to recognize their greatness. They don’t always get what they want. Leading states sometimes welcome their arrival in a very elite club, satisfying their desire for status on the world stage. At other times, however, the status quo powers are unwilling to offer recognition. Much rests on such decisions, as…
Tag: international relations theory
Author’s Response to Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory from Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot and Ido Oren both contribute useful insights, in the paper Guilhot published in Behavioral Sciences, and in Oren’s review of it here. I would like to offer a more personal perspective based on my own experience. As a young History student at Columbia College from 1969 to 1973 I did, nevertheless, hover on…
Article Review 12 on “Cyborg Pantocrator: International Relations Theory From Decisionism to Rational Choice.”
Nicolas Guilhot has established himself as arguably the leading disciplinary historian of post-World War II international relations (IR). In an earlier, “must-read” essay Guilhot painstakingly documented how, in the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled a network of realist scholars and practitioners who set out to build a theory of IR.[1] Although they could not agree…
Roundtable 3-5 on The Invention of International Relations Theory; Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation and the 1954 Conference on Theory
Constructing a new, supposedly autonomous academic discipline is anything but a neutral exercise, one that never occurs in a social or intellectual vacuum, but is invariably the product of a highly specific time, place, and context. Nicolas Guilhot’s stimulating volume of essays uses the prism of a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation conference on the theory of…