Theories of International Relations [6 ed.] 1352012170, 9781352012170

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SIXTH EDITION

THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS EDITED BY

RICHARD DEVETAK JACQUI TRUE

‘Long regarded as one of the best introductions to IR theory, now updated to reflect the latest debates and advances in the field.’ – Amitav Acharya, Distinguished Professor, American University, Washington DC, USA ‘For over 25 years, Theories of International Relations has played a prominent role in helping students understand International Relations theory. The sixth edition furthers this tradition by including new chapters which address the important approaches of postcolonialism and institutionalism. This textbook brings together an outstanding array of scholars to offer a comprehensive outline of the main theories of International Relations and how they relate to a changing world.’ – Steven Slaughter, Associate Professor, Deakin University, Australia ‘Few books can boast of having an enduring and long-lasting presence in their field but without a doubt, Theories of International Relations most certainly can. This new edition offers an authoritative survey of the discipline’s diverse and evolving theoretical terrain, as well as nuanced analysis of the key concepts, debates and ideas that have animated the study of International Relations. In short, a commanding book that deserves a place on the bookshelves of every scholar and student interested in understanding the complexities of the world of International Relations.’ – Suwita Hani Randhawa, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, UWE Bristol, UK ‘This book not only provides excellent coverage of a wide range of theoretical approaches in International Relations, but its introduction situates them in a critical historical dialogue that is instructive for students and teachers alike. The line-up of contributors is stellar, and the treatment of approaches is nuanced and very much up to date.’ – Luis Cabrera, Associate Professor of Political Science, Griffith University, Australia ‘Overseen by a new editorial team, with new and updated chapters, the sixth edition of Theories of International Relations provides a refreshing and dynamic insight into the state of the discipline at the start of the 2020s. Chapters offer a rich – yet systematic – discussion of core theories in International Relations, and readers are invited to consider how these theories help us make sense of, and respond to, our contemporary global challenges. An indispensable resource for students and researchers alike.’  – Laura McLeod, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Manchester, UK ‘This textbook continues to be core reading for students of International Relations. The inclusion of chapters on postcolonialism and institutionalism make important contributions to the scope of this key text. A fantastic next step for this book.’ – Samantha Cooke, Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Politics, University of Gloucestershire, UK

Theories of International Relations Sixth edition Richard Devetak (Ed.) Jacqui True (Ed.) Scott Burchill Andrew Linklater Jack Donnelly Terry Nardin

Matthew Paterson Christian Reus-­Smit André Saramago Toni Haastrup Alina Sajed

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Richard Devetak, Jacqui True, Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Jack Donnelly, Terry Nardin, Matthew Paterson, Christian Reus-Smit, Andrew Saramago, Toni Haastrup and Alina Sajed, 2022 Material from 1st edition © Deakin University, 1995, 1996. The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design: eStudio Calamar Cover image © Devesh Tripathi / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:  HB:       978-1-352-01217-0 PB:      978-1-352-01214-9 ePDF:    978-1-350-93276-0 eBook:  978-1-352-01215-6 Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Tables and Boxes

x

About the Editors and Authors

xi

Preface to the 6th Edition

xii

1 Introduction   1 Richard Devetak and Jacqui True

A Century of IR Theorizing     1 Post-War International Relations Theory    5 The End of Theory? Why Theory Has Never Been More Important     6 What Is Theory and How Do We Theorize?     6 Why Theorize? From Motivation to Purpose     9 Evaluating Theories   11 Explanatory Power   12 Predictive Power   12 Interpretive Power   13 Intellectual Consistency and Coherence    13 Reflexivity   13 Outline of the Book    14 Conclusion: Next Generation of IR Theorizing?    17 Glossary Terms   18

2 Realism  19 Jack Donnelly

Defining Realism   19 Exemplary Realist Arguments   22 The Hobbesian State of Nature    22 Waltzian Structural Realism   23 Characteristic Realist Propositions   24 Neo-classical Refinements of the Balancing Logic    26 Morality and Foreign Policy    27 Varieties of Realist Theories and Explanations    28 Realist ‘Theories’   28 Realist Explanations vs. Explanations that Employ Realist Elements    28 Structural Realism: Indeterminate Predictions    30 Augmented Structural Realism   31 Neo-classical Realism   32 Fear, Uncertainty and the Future of Realist theories    33 Glossary Terms   34 Further Reading   35 v

vi Contents  

3 Liberalism  36 Scott Burchill

After the Cold War    37 The Liberal View: ‘Inside Looking Out’    38 War, Democracy and Free Trade    39 Prospects for Peace   39 The Spirit of Commerce    43 Interdependence and Liberal Institutionalism    44 Human Rights   46 Globalization, the Financial System and Terrorism    49 Liberalism and Globalization   50 The Nature of ‘Free Trade’    51 Sovereignty and Foreign Investment    53 Non-State Terrorism   55 Conclusion   57 Glossary Terms   58 Further Reading   59

4 Postcolonialism  60 Alina Sajed

‘The Third World Was Not a Place, It Was a Project’    62 Postcolonialism in IR: Colonialism, Race and Epistemic Justice    67 Postcolonialism and Its Critics/Critiques    73 Concluding Remarks   75 Glossary Terms   76 Further Reading   76

5

The English School   77 Andrew Linklater and André Saramago

A Brief Overview   77 Distinctive Debates in the Post-Bipolar Era    79 Power, Order and Humanity: Core Concepts in the English School    82 Order, Justice and the ‘Standard of Civilization’ in International Society    85 The Revolt Against the West    90 Progress and Civilization in International Society    93 Conclusion   95 Glossary   95 Further Reading   96

6 Marxism  97 Andrew Linklater and André Saramago

The Historical Materialist Conception of History    99 Class Struggles, Nature and International Relations   102 Imperialism and Dependency   107 The Continued Relevance of Marxism for International Relations   110

Contents   vii

Conclusion  117 Glossary of Terms   118 Further Reading  118

7

Critical Theory  119 Richard Devetak

Origins of Critical Theory   120 The Politics of Knowledge in International Relations Theory   122 Problem-Solving and Critical Theories   123 Critical Theory’s Task as an Emancipatory Theory   125 Rethinking Political Community   128 The Normative Dimension: The Critique of Ethical Particularism and Social Exclusion   129 The Sociological Dimension: States, Social Forces and Changing World Orders   131 The Praxeological Dimension: Cosmopolitanism and Discourse Ethics   134 Dialogue and Discourse Ethics   136 Conclusion  138 Glossary  139 Further Reading  140

8 Feminism(s) 141 Jacqui True

Waves of Feminisms and Generations of Feminist International Relations   142 Empirical Feminism  144 Making Women and Gender Structures Visible   145 Gendering Institutional Institutions   146 Gendering Foreign Policy and War   147 Introducing New Transnational Actors   149 Analytical Feminism  150 Gendered Divisions of Domestic and International   150 Feminist Revisioning of IR Levels of Analysis   151 Gender Bias of IR Concepts   154 Normative Feminism  156 Diverse Feminist Epistemologies   157 Deconstructing Gender  159 Conclusion  161 Glossary Terms  162 Further Reading  163

9 Post-Structuralism 164 Richard Devetak

Power and Knowledge in International Relations   164 Genealogy  165

viii Contents  

Textual Strategies of Post-Structuralism   169 Deconstruction  170 Double Reading  172 Ashley’s Double Reading of the Anarchy Problématique  172 Problematizing Sovereign States   174 Violence  174 Boundaries  176 Identity  177 Statecraft  179 Beyond the Paradigm of Sovereignty: Rethinking the Political   181 Sovereignty and the Ethics of Exclusion   183 Post-Structuralist Ethics  184 Conclusion  186 Glossary Terms  186 Further Reading  187

10 Constructivism 188 Christian Reus-Smit

Rationalist Theory Versus Critical Theory   189 Constructivism  190 The Contribution of Constructivism   196 Constructivism’s Discontents and Limitations   197 Cutting-Edge Constructivism  201 Conclusion  204 Glossary of Terms   205 Further Reading  206

11 Institutionalism 207 Toni Haastrup

Introduction  207 The Institutionalisms: What Are They?   208 Rational-Choice Institutionalism  212 Sociological Institutionalism  213 Historical Institutionalism  213 Discursive Institutionalism  215 Feminist Institutionalism  215 The Uses of Institutionalisms   216 Critiques and Overlaps   220 Conclusion  221 Glossary of Terms   222 Further Reading  222

Contents   ix

12 Green Theory   224 Matthew Paterson

Theorizing Environment Within International Relations     226 Institutionalist Accounts of Environmental Politics     227 Beyond IR: Green Politics and the Challenge to World Order     228 Bio-Environmentalism – Authority, Scale and Ecocentrism     229 Social Greens – Limits to Growth and Political Economy    233 Social Limits to Growth    234 Back to the Commons    235 Greening Global Politics   236 The Anthropocene: Rethinking Green Global Politics?    239 Conclusions   242 Glossary Terms   243 Further Reading   243

13 International Political Theory   244 Terry Nardin

Theorizing International Politics    244 Justice in War    246 From International to Global Justice     250 From Global Justice to Global Order    254 The History of International Thought    258 Glossary Terms   261 Further Reading   261 References262 Index 314

List of Tables and Boxes Tables 11.1 New institutionalisms 11.2 Four typologies of institutional change

212 215

Boxes 2.1 Realists Responses to the Rise of China 3.1 The US Invasion of Iraq 4.1 Border Imperialism and the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis – A Postcolonial 5.1 Environmental Stewardship and the Institutions of International Society 6.1 The Rise of China as Passive Revolution 7.1 Post-Truth Politics and Critical Theory 8.1 Feminist Foreign Policy 9.1 9/11 and the War on Terror: The Politics of the Event 10.1 A Constructivist Interpretation of the COVID-19 Pandemic 11.1 An Institutionalist Account of Crisis: The EU and Migration 12.1 Green Global Politics in Action? The Transition Network 13.1 What Is an Atrocity?

x

21 41 72 90 116 127 157 168 195 217 237 246

About the Editors and Authors Richard Devetak (ed.)  is Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Critical International Theories: An Intellectual History (Oxford University Press 2018) and a number of publications on international intellectual history. Jacqui True (ed.)  is Professor of International Relations, Director of the Gender, Peace and Security Centre at Monash University, Victoria, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Her recent books include Violence Against Women: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press 2021) and The Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace and Security (Oxford University Press 2019). Scott Burchill  is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. He has also taught at Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania. His most recent book is Misunderstanding International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). Jack Donnelly  is the Andrew Mellon Professor in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Denver, Colorado. He works principally in the areas of international relations theory and international human rights. Toni Haastrup  is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics in History, Heritage and Politics at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her work seeks to understand prevailing global power hierarchies that inform cooperation and conflict within the international system drawing on critical feminist theorizing. Andrew Linklater  is Emeritus Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. He is a member of the Academy of Social Science and a fellow of the British Academy and Learned Society of Wales. Terry Nardin  is Professor of Politics at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Matthew  Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester and Research Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. His research focuses on the political economy, global governance and cultural politics of climate change. Christian Reus-Smit  is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His recent books include International Relations: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2020) and On Cultural Diversity (Cambridge University Press 2018). Alina Sajed  is Associate Professor with the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Postcolonial Encounters in International Relations. The Politics of Transgression in the Maghreb (Routledge, 2013), and the co-editor (with Randolph Persaud) of Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations (Routledge 2018). André Saramago  is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is a Fellow of the Norbert Elias Foundation, Netherlands. His research interests focus on critical international theory, historical sociology and the relation between ecology and world politics. xi

Preface to the 6th Edition We are grateful to Andrew Linklater and Scott Burchill who encouraged us to take on the editorship of Theories of International Relations after their leadership of the volume from the outset and across five editions. It has been very rewarding for both our careers to be part of Theories, and we remain indebted to Andrew Linklater in particular for recruiting us early on to the project when we were postgraduate students. Our involvement in the volume tracks both of our careers in the field of International Relations, our respective movements to and from the Southern and Northern hemispheres, and attempts to grapple with the change and continuity in world politics across the twenty-five years since the first edition was published. While they are not representative by any means, we take our own experiences of shifting our research focus and undertaking new intellectual projects as reflecting the changes in the International Relations discipline and the ongoing quest to understand the political world in which we live. Like earlier editions, this one presents rigorous, fair and detailed accounts of the theories currently animating the discipline. In this regard, we continue a twenty-five-year tradition of Theories of International Relations while updating and refreshing the volume for a new generation. Theories of International Relations was the first text in the discipline to provide a systematic, cutting-edge survey of theories, including post-positivist and critical theories. The volume originally emanated from Australia, though with a multinational authorship. This edition further diversifies that authorship and the theories included, since International Relations is a dynamic field with both new and enduring theoretical perspectives and themes. In this edition we are very pleased to include two new chapters and scholars, ‘Institutionalism’ by Toni Haastrup and ‘Postcolonialism’ by Alina Sajed. We are influenced by and committed to the global IR project, as outlined by Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan, Antje Wiener, Arlene Tickner and Karen Smith, and others. How could we not be, given that Theories emanated from ‘down under’, to coin a colloquialism for Australia and New Zealand, the settler-colonial states at the antipodes of the historical centres of IR scholarship in Europe and North America. Understanding the variety of contexts and perspectives in which knowledge is formed remains a vital task of IR theory. We are grateful also to fellow authors who have been part of the Theories of IR project across several editions, all of whom are eminent scholars and experienced teachers immersed in the study of international relations. Finally, we must acknowledge the conditions under which this edition was prepared. The COVID-19 global pandemic generated a global health crisis the likes of which have not been seen in over a century. If the salience of IR theory was not already evident, the COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder of the need to think theoretically about the things that matter to humanity and the planet, especially at the level of the international and the global. We look forward to feedback from students and scholars in the field, which is essential to keeping theoretical debates alive, and motivates us to continue the tradition of theorizing in the field of International Relations. Richard Devetak Jacqui True xii

INTRODUCTION

RICHARD DEVETAK AND JACQUI TRUE

1

International Relations has had a strong theoretical orientation throughout its century-long academic study. A good understanding of the theoretical terrain, appreciating the strengths and weaknesses, the limitations and possibilities of a broad range of theories is imperative for all scholars and students in the discipline. It is also crucial to understand the changed intellectual and international contexts in which scholars have theorized across more than a century of study. This has been the chief purpose of Theories of International Relations over its lifetime, and it remains the purpose of this sixth edition. International Relations (upper case, by convention) is the name of the discipline or field that studies the complex phenomena we are theorizing – international relations (lower case). The discipline has evolved alongside theorizing about political phenomena between, beyond and across states. Scholars often talk about – and scholarly journals in the field are titled – variously ‘world politics’, ‘world affairs’, ‘global politics’ and ‘global political economy’ to convey the changing and expanding subject matter that we aim to address. The study of international relations today thus goes well beyond the exclusive relations of states or nations: it involves, among other things, theorizing the relationship between international politics and economics and globalization processes, the role of non-state actors such as corporations, social movements, armed groups and the like, and the increasing global governance of key transnational issues and challenges, not least race, economic development, climate change, human rights, people movement, gender equality, health, peace and security. In this introduction, we first set out the historical and contemporary disciplinary contexts of International Relations. We then survey the competing understandings of theory and its purposes, review how to evaluate and apply theory, while also reflecting on some key theoretical debates throughout. Finally, we outline the content of the volume as a whole and the chapters that follow, highlighting what is updated and new in this edition. Above all, we emphasize the relevance and application of theory to enduring questions of war and peace, human conflict and cooperation. We also stress the significant synergy and overlap between theories similarly grappling with how to understand and/or transform the system of international politics despite their distinctive schools and intellectual origins.

A Century of IR Theorizing People have been thinking and writing about international relations for over two millennia. Since ancient writers such as the Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzu and Greek general and historian Thucydides, humans have reflected on politics, war and peace among peoples. But it was

1

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not until the 20th century that international relations was established as an academic discipline and taught in universities as a discrete subject. Like other modern disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, IR is preoccupied with its origins and development. It has constructed narratives that serve not only to disclose past thinking about IR, but also to confirm the discipline’s identity and existence, to advertise the rival theories and exclude other theories. Knowledge of the discipline’s history has not always been helped by the preoccupation with theory. Often theories present mythologized disciplinary histories that obscure more than they reveal about what actually happened. This has been corrected over the past two decades with the flourishing of historiographical studies of the discipline, which have exposed the myths on which traditional disciplinary narratives are based (see Schmidt 2002; Bell 2009). The traditional histories depict a succession of phases or ‘waves of theoretical activity’ (Bull 1972: 33; Hollis and Smith 1990: ch. 2). Typically the story starts in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War (1914– 1918) and with the establishment of the first Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (Buzan 2020). The initial phase, so the story goes, was dominated by forms of liberalism or idealism that were characterized by progressive commitments to peace, international law and international organizations. With the rise of European fascism and several colonial military campaigns, liberalism seemed naive to many, giving way to realism and its focus on power, conflict and the interests of states. By the 1960s, attention turned to questions of method as realism came under challenge for its unscientific approach to knowledge and its preoccupation with the ‘high politics’ of states, diplomacy and war. Developments in the 1970s (for example, the OPEC oil crisis, calls for a New International Economic Order by the Group of 77 states from the Global South, the US decision to float the dollar, closer European integration and the growth of multinational corporations) made it plain that international politics could not be separated from the world economy. This gave rise to theories of complex interdependence, which widened the agenda of IR to include non-state actors as well as economic and transnational processes (Strange 1970, 1986; Keohane and Nye 1979). This in turn prompted a backlash in the form of neo-realism, which sought to reassert a form of realism on the basis of theory and methods developed in microeconomics (Waltz 1979) and the entrance of Marxism into IR (Maclean 1981; Kubalkova and Cruikshank 1985). This cast IR into a phase of theoretical contention between so-called positivists and post-positivists (including critical theorists and feminists) who rejected the focus and methods of dominant theories of IR by addressing normatively inflected questions about structures of exclusion, domination, inequality and marginalization both in the real world of international relations and in the academy. The 21st century has seen the flourishing of revisionist histories that tell a rather different story of the discipline’s Anglo and masculine origins and development. These revisionist histories pitch themselves as counter-histories with two main purposes: first, to challenge 1919 as an origin myth (see De Carvalho et al. 2011); and second, to recover the dispersed, forgotten and marginalized contributions to the origins and development of IR as a field of knowledge (see inter alia Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2015; Tickner and True 2018). Aberystwyth 1919 is often held up as the birthplace of IR because it marks the establishment of the world’s first academic department dedicated to the study of international relations, the Department of International Politics. But as Brian Schmidt (1998) and others have argued, the academic study of international relations was not miraculously born at Aberystwyth in 1919

Introduction   3

(see also Thakur et al. 2017). From the late 19th century, for example, American political scientists such as Paul S. Reinsch and Francis Lieber began to carve out ‘a discrete discourse about international politics’ (Schmidt 2008: 676). It is important to situate this discourse in the context of the time. There existed no theories of international relations as we have come to understand them. The emergent discourse of IR had to be assembled out of concepts made available by the disciplines that fed into it, principally politics, history and international law. At the heart of intellectual developments in the last quarter of the 19th century was what Schmidt (1998: ch. 2) calls ‘the theoretical discourse of the state’. Even though this discourse encompassed domestic and international politics, as well as the ambiguously international relations of empire and colonial administration, it laid the foundations of the ‘political discourse of anarchy’, in which the international affairs of states could be studied as an analytically distinct domain of politics (Schmidt 1998: 44–45). The concept of anarchy  – understood here to mean the absence of government rather than chaos and disorder – became widely understood as the defining feature of international relations, distinguishing it from domestic politics where the presence of government is assumed. Complementing Schmidt’s history, Robert Vitalis has argued in his path-breaking book on the origins of American IR, White World Order, Black Power Politics, that it was European empires that provided the context in which IR emerged as a ‘specialized field of knowledge’ (Vitalis 2005: 160). Given the turn-of-the-century context, it is unsurprising that, as Vitalis (2005: 161) points out, the emergent discipline made states, racial classification and hierarchy the central objects of its enquiry. The focus of much of this work was on the political and legal problems of empire, colonial administration and ‘race subjection’. While it may have dropped from view across the discipline’s 20th-century development, race was a central preoccupation of early American IR.  As Vitalis (2005: 173) notes, the eminent IR journal published by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Foreign Affairs, emerged in 1922 when the CFR took over the Clark University-­ based Journal of International Relations, which had been published previously under the title Journal of Race Development between 1910 and 1919. The ‘real institutional origins of IR’ at least in the USA, he argues, are to be found prior to 1919 in ‘the wave of new courses, publications, popular and scholarly journals’ that followed America’s territorial expansion, prompting anxieties about ‘rising tides of colour’ and threats to white civilization and world order (Vitalis 2015: ch. 3; also Horsman 1981). Since then, IR has shared with other spheres of American life a tendency to turn a blind eye to the role of race and racism (Vitalis 2005: 160; Blatt 2018). Another aspect of IR’s historiography, says Vitalis, has been the ‘norm against noticing’ the contributions of African American scholars. Scholars and public intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche and Merze Tate not only sought to dismantle the intellectual edifices of racial discrimination, but also highlighted international practices of statecraft that sustained inequality through imperialism and colonialism (Vitalis 2015: 12). These scholars, whom Vitalis (2015: 11) refers to collectively as ‘the Howard School’ of IR, saw what white scholars were blind to: the devastating political impact of the global ‘color-line’, to use Du Bois’s (2018: 3) term. The ‘norm of not noticing’ also applies to women’s contributions to the study of international relations. J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True (2018: 222) have argued that it is not that feminism came late to IR but rather that the discipline of IR came late to feminism, disregarding a century of women’s activism on peace, democracy and international institutions in the context of inter-­ state relation. Disciplinary histories are predominantly told as stories of men’s contributions to the

4  Theories of International Relations

origins and development of International Relations as a field of enquiry. As Patricia Owens (2018: 467) observes, ‘[i]t is women’s absence, rather than presence, that is most striking’ in these historical accounts. The absence of women in disciplinary histories, however, should not be construed as evidence that women were not actively contributing to the study of IR before and after the discipline’s establishment. Rather, it is evidence of a male-dominated field with a narrow construction of its boundaries and history. A more historically sensitive approach is required to ‘challenge existing standards of inclusion within histories of international thought’, and to ‘pluralize’ what counts as a contribution to International Relations (Owens 2018: 475). Such an approach would expand the scope of disciplinary histories to include writings on colonial administration by the likes of Lucy Philip Mair (Owens 2018: 468) and Merze Tate (Vitalis 2015: 161–166), and the works of women’s peace activists such as Jane Addams, the founder of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the second woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, after the anti-­ war author Bertha von Suttner, for her work in striving towards more peaceful international relations (Tickner and True 2018). Intellectual history can therefore recover the contributions of women to the story of International Relations’ origins and development by looking beyond the parameters of conventional historiographies and challenging the dominant construction of the IR canon. Reflecting on the discipline’s history, therefore, should not be seen as something outside the theorist’s purview. First, it is an important aspect of theorizing because the construction of the discipline informs which authors should be read and cited, what questions should be posed and which actors, structures and processes should be studied. In other words, appreciating disciplinary history enables a better understanding of how the discipline’s identity and purpose have been defined over time. Crucially, it also enables contestation and critical challenges to dominant constructions of the discipline’s identity and purpose. Second, it helps to avoid repeating past mistakes or ‘reinventing the wheel’ (Schmidt 2008: 677), serving to remind us that we are neither the first nor the last theorists to analyse international relations and that the terms we use have a history. But it might also lead to the recovery of forgotten or lost ‘intellectual treasure’ (Skinner 1996: 112) that can help us see our current problems in a new or different light. Third, disciplinary histories illuminate how thinking has changed over time. They encourage us to reflect on the adaptability of human thought and its changeable relationship to events in the real world. Different concerns have found expression in theories of international relations at different moments in history: the historiographically informed theorist will seek to know what kinds of intellectual frameworks or concepts were available at different times, which were dominant and why, and what their legacy has been. Today’s theorist will then be better placed to reflect on the intellectual tools available to theorize international relations. There is no need here to trace exhaustively the development of IR over the last century, suffice to say that many such histories and stocktaking exercises have been conducted (Schmidt 2002; Kristensen 2016). What is important, however, is to understand how and why IR scholars came to believe that theorizing was a vital intellectual imperative, and how this has given rise to a discipline characterized by great theoretical diversity. With the advent of ‘global International Relations’ (Acharya 2014), which reflects the growth of the field in non-Western countries and a quest to encompass a broader range of ideas, approaches and experiences beyond the Western academy, we can expect further revisionist histories and also critiques of International Relations as a discipline (see Walker 1981; Shilliam 2011; Tickner and Blaney 2012; Acharya and Buzan 2019).

Introduction   5

Post-War International Relations Theory It was not always the case that International Relations scholars valued theory. The subject was predominantly empiricist and institutionalist in orientation until the 1950s. But theory rapidly rose in intellectual prestige after the Second World War (Devetak 2018: ch. 1). A major event in transforming the discipline of IR was a conference held in Washington in 1954. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the conference brought together a number of leading IR scholars who were uncomfortable with the absorption of IR into the intellectual framework of American social science. The list of participants included a number of scholars: Hans J.  Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, William T.R. Fox, Arnold Wolfers and Dorothy Fosdick among others (Guilhot 2008: 295). It is with these thinkers, who are usually identified with classical realism, that IR theory finds its beginnings, according to Nicolas Guilhot (2008) and Michael Williams (2013). It was an act of ‘intellectual irredentism’ or resistance to the emerging hegemony of social scientific approaches to IR (Guilhot 2008: 282; Williams 2013: 648). Resisting the characteristic liberal vision and behavioural methods of the social sciences, these scholars sought to define IR ‘as a separate field based on a distinct theory of politics’ (Guilhot 2008: 281). By seeking to develop a theoretical vision of international relations, albeit one associated with realism, they opened a space for the development of competing theories that would marshal different methods to competing intellectual and normative ends. By the late 1960s and 1970s, debate over method became a feature of IR. This was driven by two developments. First was the growth in behavioural social science. Efforts to apply more rigorous scientific methods to IR were enthusiastically embraced, particularly in the USA. Elsewhere in the Anglosphere, however, scepticism about behaviouralism resulted in a defence of ‘classical’ approaches (Bull 1966). The second development occurred in the world of international relations rather than the discipline and marked a shift in the post-war order. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods international monetary consensus and the adoption of floating exchange rates opened up the global economy, while the rise of Third World states calling for a new international economic order, European integration and new social movements (black and civil rights, environmental and women’s/feminist) across the world liberalized the international political sphere. These changes in the lived experience of world politics suggested that the prevailing scope of International Relations that was largely focused on the strategic interests of states and the ‘embedded liberal’ order (Ruggie 1982) was too limited and exclusive. Theorists challenged a number of distinctions: high versus low politics, politics and economics, state and non-state actors and so on. Together, these two developments primed International Relations for a range of new intellectual orientations. New theoretical perspectives and methods, and a wider focus on transnational and international political economy issues emerged in IR, predicated on higher levels of theoretical abstraction and debate. As part of that turn to theory, Critical Theory emerged in the early 1980s as a perspective on international relations (Devetak 2018: ch. 3). Critical Theory scholars challenged and exposed the ideological and normative interests embedded in IR theories, especially realist and liberal theories and their empiricist and non-normative approaches to the accumulation of knowledge, support for nuclear détente and a world order based on capitalist democracy. Debate about the politics of knowledge became a central feature of the study of world politics in the 1980s and 1990s, largely owing to the interventions of critical theorists who were an important voice in expanding the intellectual scope of International Relations as a discipline. As a result, theory and theorizing is an increasingly vital terrain for International Relations scholars: long gone are the days when knowing about current events or the history of war and diplomacy were sufficient in this field.

6  Theories of International Relations

T he End of Theory? Why Theory Has Never Been More Important Theory has been central to the development of the study of international relations, yet the nature of theorizing in International Relations continues to evolve and reshape the discipline. Some scholars have suggested that we are at ‘the end of theory’ in terms of grand theorizing of international relations, with many types of theory coexisting without a single theoretical centre or agreed set of questions or theoretical debates in which all engage (Kristensen 2012; Dunne et al. 2013; Tickner 2013; Oren 2016). Indeed, the sense that IR no longer has a centre or agreed set of questions has been a pervasive feature of the discipline since at least the 1980s, when a range of new theories emerged to challenge the dominant approaches. While some IR scholars lamented this situation as a cause of theoretical confusion (Holsti 1985), others celebrated the proliferation of theories as an opportunity to expand the theoretical scope of the discipline and to reveal neglected structures and processes, and marginalized, silenced or excluded actors (George and Campbell 1990; Enloe 1996). It was in the context of these reflections on the state of IR theory that this book was first published in 1996. Conventional accounts of IR theory were until then typically constructed around tripartite schemas of realism, liberalism and Marxism. These ‘isms’ remain important and meaningful, and continue to find powerful expression. But exciting and innovative theoretical developments in IR have arisen precisely out of challenges to the traditionally dominant theories and their understanding of how the world of international relations works. An account of IR theory thus has had to recognize and accommodate the proliferation of theories; which is why this volume has been set apart from many others for its inclusion of postmodernism, feminism and green theory from the outset. Different theories provide not just competing accounts of the same international phenomena, but identify and illuminate altogether different phenomena on the basis of alternative approaches to knowledge formation. Often they employ different concepts, but even when they employ the same concepts they may interpret them differently. At a deeper level, theories assume different values, pursue different interests in knowledge formation, make different assumptions about the things that make up reality and how they can be known, and hold different views about how knowledge claims can be validated. As a consequence, they open up new worlds to the scholar and student of international relations, offering new ways of seeing and knowing their subject matter. Each IR theory tells us something about international relations; but none can explain everything. Indeed, each theory will define the very purpose and scope of its theorizing differently. But before we go any further it is important to pause and consider what theory is and what it means to theorize.

What Is Theory and How Do We Theorize? Consider the following wide-ranging definitions of theory: Theories are general statements that describe and explain causes or effects of classes of phenomena. (van Evera 1997: 7–8)

Introduction   7

Rather than being mere collections of laws, theories are statements that explain them. (Waltz 1979: 5) The enterprise of theoretical investigation is at its minimum one directed towards criticism: towards identifying, formulating, refining, and questioning the general assumptions on which the everyday discussion of international politics proceeds. At its maximum the enterprise is concerned also with theoretical construction: with establishing that certain assumptions are true while others are false, certain arguments are valid while others are invalid, and so proceeding to erect a firm structure of knowledge. (Bull 1973: 32) [Theories] are a necessary means of bringing order to the subject matter of International Relations. (Burchill and Linklater 2013: 16) [Theories are ways of] thinking about power, justice, society, and so on. (Ackerly and True 2020: 3) The activity of theory is, literally, about seeing. Theorein, the Greek word from which our own derives, meant to watch or to look at. (Elshtain 1981: 301) [Theories] construct knowledge from marginalized and previously not heard, unfamiliar voices and issues and use this knowledge to challenges the core assumptions of the IR discipline. (Tickner 1997: 617) As the above definitions indicate, there is little agreement about what theory is, how one ought to theorize and why we theorize. That said, it is possible to provide an account of theory that is wide enough to encompass the diverse conceptions of theory. In the broadest sense, theory is a form of abstract knowledge that goes beyond ordinary common sense. Characterized as a reflective or contemplative reasoning of a detached observer (the vita contemplativa), theory is often counterposed to the engaged activity of practice (the vita activa). But this opposition between theory and practice, the contemplative and active life, is hard to sustain if theory is thought of as an intellectual practice; and particularly so for critical theory as we explain further in due course, where theory is seen as a form of praxis – a way of effecting social change in the world. To theorize is to engage in acts of intellectual abstraction; it is to search for, to test and to refine the intellectual techniques and methods that will enable coherent analyses of a chosen subject. IR theory is therefore the form of knowledge about international relations achieved through intellectual acts of abstraction. A related way of considering what theory is, is to describe what it means to theorize. Again, theorists will differ in how they describe the process or acts of theorizing. But any theory will do at least two things. (There are other ways of explicating theory, but this is one useful method.) The first act of a theory is to filter reality to select and classify the things it takes to be relevant to its investigation. As James Rosenau and Mary Durfee (1995: 2) helpfully explain, theory acts as a kind of ‘sorting mechanism’, telling us which things are important to observe and which are not; which things in the world matter to the analysis, and by extension which don’t. Should the theorist focus on states, and if so, which ones? Or should the theorist focus on something else, perhaps non-state actors such as non-governmental organizations or transnational corporations? Alternatively, the theorist might focus instead on social classes or on human bodies – the gendered, sexed, raced bodies that experience international relations in different ways. This is a question of the theory’s

8  Theories of International Relations

ontology; that is, the things taken to make up reality. You might think of ontology, therefore, as the study of what exists in the world or of the key elements and actors that constitute it. How a theory filters reality will shape and be shaped by the kind of questions posed by the theorist, questions that have an intellectual and historical context. Some theoretical questions are designed to reveal patterns, structures, logics or forces that are invisible to the human eye or are not always perceived by actors, perhaps because they are so obvious, hidden in plain sight. These may be structures that socialize states to behave in particular ways, such as the structure of anarchy that neo-realists theorize, or social forces that create structures of domination, inequality and exclusion and that disempower groups of people based on their race, class or gender. Or they may be designed to interrogate the meaning or significance of an action, practice or institution or to diagnose a condition or situation. Other theoretical questions will be normative, adopting a critical stance and enquiring into the legitimacy of an actor or institution or the ethics of their behaviours and practices in the international arena. Often these questions will lead to judgements and prescriptions about courses of action. It is not uncommon for theories to tackle both types of questions, the empirical and diagnostic on the one hand, and the critical and normative on the other, but they are at least analytically separable types or moments of theory. The second act of a theory is conceptualization. Guided by the question posed, theories ‘abstract’ from the raw material under observation and investigation. In a useful metaphor, Rosenau and Durfee (1995: 3–5) describe the process of abstraction as being like climbing a ladder. With each step up the ladder the theorist asks, ‘of what is this an instance?’, clustering details and identifying classes of phenomena at a given level so as to discern larger meanings or patterns. For example, the global outbreak of COVID-19 is a particular instance of what general phenomenon? The first act of abstraction might be to conceptualize it as a global health pandemic. At a higher level of abstraction, the pandemic might be conceptualized as the product of globalization as people, goods and disease mix and move freely across the planet. Alternatively, it might be conceptualized as an instance of humanity’s ecologically destructive mode of domination over nature. The higher one climbs up the ‘ladder of abstraction’, the more general will be the statements made or patterns identified. The particular procedures or methods of abstraction will vary from one theory to another depending on the ontological premises, the normative interests and the epistemological assumptions of the theory (that is, their assumptions about how reliable or valid knowledge is produced, or if that is at all possible, or even the goal of knowledge). While IR theory by definition will be concerned with the study of international relations (however it is named or defined), it also needs to reflect on the enquiring subject; that is, the theorist conducting the investigation. After all, theorists do not exist outside the world of international relations; we live in the same world that we are trying to understand and explain. Thus, our interpretations and explanations of the world cannot be separated from our experience in it or from our hopes and values. Robert W. Cox (1981: 128) captures this paradox in the following oft-quoted passage from his classic article ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’: Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. All theories have a perspective. Perspectives derive from a position in time and space, specifically social and political time and space. The world is seen from a standpoint definable in terms of nation or social class [or gender or race etc.], of dominance or subordination, of rising or declining power, of a sense of immobility or present crisis, of past experience, and of hopes and expectations for the future.

Introduction   9

There is a fundamental divide on this point, however, between scholars who seek to define and structure theory in terms of the methodological principles of the natural or physical sciences (often called positivists) and those who believe that IR as a social science cannot simply emulate the natural sciences (see Taylor 1983). The former believe that phenomena in the social world exist independently of the intellectual techniques and methods used by theorists in their quest to understand and explain things. The latter believe that phenomena in the social world consist of human self-­ understandings, motives, intentions, ideas and actions that compel the theorist to employ interpretive techniques in the quest for theoretical understanding and explanation. For these scholars, often referred to as post-positivists, and that includes Cox, it is important to treat the theorist as inextricably caught up in the world they are examining. They reject the notion inherent to the natural or physical sciences that the enquiring subject is a value-free onlooker, completely detached from the object or phenomena under investigation. Instead, they recognize the subject as a condition of knowledge. The ontological, normative and epistemological assumptions made by the theorist should therefore themselves be treated as facts or data worthy of analysis. The point here is that because the world the social scientist or IR theorist investigates is interpretively constituted by us, and theories are also interpretations of and in that world, theories are partly constitutive of the reality of international relations (Smith 1995: 26–27). They reflect ideas that have a material influence on the behaviour and actions of state and non-state actors and are articulated within – and often reflect – a given historical and institutional context. This division between positivism and post-positivism parallels the distinction often made between understanding and explanation (Hollis and Smith 1990). But, as Hidemi Suganami (1996) argues, the distinction between explanation and understanding should not be overplayed; it is a matter of degrees of difference rather than outright opposition. Explanations help actors understand their situation. The self-understandings of actors must also be part of the explanation. For example, we should examine both the theories explaining state behaviour and international regimes with regard to the acquisition, control and ban on nuclear weapons as well as the perspectives of key state actors, such as Iran, the USA and other state parties in the acceptance and subsequent collapse of the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Why Theorize? From Motivation to Purpose In addition to understanding what theory is and how it is conducted, we need to appreciate why we theorize. That is, theory must have an account of itself, one that clarifies where our theoretical inspiration and questions come from (see Popper 1957). Theory is motivated by something prior, by curiosity or by an interest in developing deeper knowledge about our chosen subject. The neo-­ realist Kenneth Waltz (1979) would say that IR theory is motivated by an interest in knowing how far control can be exerted over the international environment. Others would invoke less instrumental interests, including practical knowledge to improve communication and cooperation across boundaries, and interests in dismantling the global structures and practices of domination and exclusion. At bottom, the urge to theorize derives from the ancient classical tradition that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, an imperative attributed to Socrates at his Athenian trial (Plato, Apology 38a). The same goes for IR theory. To exist in the world and not seek to understand its key logics – in the forces, structures and practices that shape our lives – is to be a passive subject; it is to be impacted by external events and dynamics without being able to understand them, let

10  Theories of International Relations

alone effectively shape or contribute to them. By following the Socratic dictum, therefore, IR theory provides a means of examining international life. Theories contribute to our stock of knowledge by providing explanations that guide what and how we see and act in the world. We test out our theories, including our theories of international relations, honing them to help us understand and explain the world we live in. Scholarly acts of theorizing are intended to make our understanding and explanations much more systematic and rigorous. They are a self-conscious and transparent way of accumulating, sharing and/or contesting knowledge claims among the community of scholars we call a discipline. In International Relations, that community is increasingly global and being expanded to new groups and generations as well as to more parts of the world, especially the global South. This widens the intellectual horizon of IR as a discipline and enlarges the stock of knowledge that can be used to guide our thought and action. We engage in theorizing about international relations when we make assumptions about what is a security threat, where is a safe place to travel, the prospects for employment in a competitive global political economy or a pandemic and so on. As we have argued, theories allow us to generalize, to abstract broader principles from a case in hand and use these principles to explain a particular situation or guide a specific choice. In short, we need the conceptual framework that theories provide to help us think logically, consistently and critically; to defend what we claim to know; to decide what should be studied and how it should be studied. Many IR scholars are motivated to understand or explain ‘how the world works’ in order to investigate the forces of both continuity and change in world politics. Thus, these scholars have sought to examine and explain periods of relative stability such as the century of peace among European states from the Congress of Vienna (1815) until the First World War or the so-called long peace after the Second World War (e.g. Gaddis 1986). They have also sought to explain change such as the rise of international institutions and transnational networks in global politics (Keohane and Nye 1979; Keck and Sikkink 1998) as well as periods of punctuated change, for example in the global political economy, with both the 1930s Great Depression and the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 (Polanyi 1948; Helleiner 2014). However, even theories that claim their only purpose is to explain what is happening may reflect the interests of current institutions and hegemonic powers with stability rather than change. Theories of the rise and fall of great powers, of neo-liberal institutionalism and liberal internationalism, for example, tend to betray the concerns of a particular historical time and geopolitical order that benefits the interests of some more than others (e.g. Keohane 1984; Kennedy 1989; Ikenberry 2011). A further purpose of theory is to solve apparent problems in world politics. This has been coined ‘problem-solving’ research, and can also include diagnostic theories addressing problems of the moment in politics and policy. The explanatory or problem-solving purpose of theory is continually renewed by the dynamic nature of global politics, as new issues always arise and events occur that challenge or rupture existing understandings. For International Relations, the collapse of communism and end of the Cold War represented such a rupture in theoretical expectations about bipolarity and the structure of the international system. That historical event challenged existing theories and their assumption that change could not happen in the international system, and definitely not from domestic sources. Different notions of how knowledge progresses in the philosophy and sociology of science have implications for how we think about the purpose of theories of international relations and their

Introduction   11

response to new or challenging empirical phenomena. Famously, Thomas Kuhn (1962) argues that science progresses through ‘revolutions’ or ‘paradigm changes’. Normal science, in which scholars continually add to the evidence base for a traditional theory, is ruptured when new theories emerge that provide entirely different understandings and surmount the old theories. Lakatos provides a contrasting view of scientific progress based on research programmes that have core and auxiliary theories and assumptions; the auxiliary set can be adapted to address new phenomena or ‘anomalies’ for the theory that emerge without threatening the validity of the core. In this view, research programmes advance to the extent that their theories can incorporate and explain the new phenomena, which Lakatos (1970: 135) refers to as ‘a sea of anomalies’. Major debates in IR have questioned the positivist idea that theory should be able to explain, solve, predict and, therefore, control social and political life (Ashley and Walker 1990; Neufeld 1995; Ackerly et al. 2006; Jackson 2010). Theories not only aim to understand and explain international politics, they may also aim to transform global politics. According to Karl Marx ([1843] 1967: 215), for instance, the task of the scholar joins that of the world ‘to improve self-­understanding of the age concerning its struggles and wishes’, with the purpose being to relieve these struggles and to pursue the wishes. U2 lead singer Bono conveyed this emancipatory purpose of theory when he said, ‘I am rebelling against the idea that the world is the way the world is, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it’ (Harvard Gazette 2001). Normative concerns drive all International Relations theorizing, whether consciously or not. If a theory represents itself as objective, without bias or a perspective, and as the single theory that explains the truth, it is, as Cox (in Cox and Sinclair 1996: 87) says, ‘all the more important to examine it as ideology, and to lay bare its concealed perspective’. Critical theorists of international relations seek not only to understand how the current world order is maintained, but also to explore how it can be changed to address the root causes of many problems that transcend borders. Linklater aimed to reunite the study of international relations under the guidance of critical theory (1992a: 790). He showed how it could be done by harnessing normative, empirical and practical analysis of logics of power, order and emancipation in world politics. That unification has not occurred, but we can see efforts at this synthesis with variants of IR constructivism (see Chapter 11) and feminism (Chapter 9) integrating normative concerns with ideas and moral action with an empirical, methodological approach that takes into account non-state actors – previous anomalies for traditional theories.

Evaluating Theories Whether or not you approach theory to explain, understand, solve a problem or critically analyse the potential for social change, there are a number of rival perspectives on international relations on offer to achieve these aims. Some scholars view the proliferation of theories in IR to be an identity crisis, an indication of fragmentation and regression rather than progress. Is the diversity of theories a problem? Only if you are on a quest to find a single truth is our view. As IR expands and transcends the boundaries of the previously Eurocentric, male-dominated and somewhat rigid discipline, and theories proliferate, we need to be able to engage with different and new theories. But how do we evaluate which is the best or most appropriate among them? One response is that the theory you prefer or adopt depends on the question you are asking. But which questions or

12  Theories of International Relations

phenomena are the most important to study is itself a question of theory that scholars do not always agree on. Specifically, then, what criteria can we use to judge theories or theoretical perspectives? Burchill and Linklater (2009) suggested the following six criteria in a previous edition of this book: 1. A theory’s understanding of an issue or process 2. The explanatory power of a theory 3. The theory’s success in predicting events... 4. The theory’s intellectual consistency and coherence 5. The scope of the theory 6. The theory’s capacity for critical self-reflection and intellectual engagement with contending theories Since there is no theoretical objectivity or absolute ‘truth’, it is good to be explicit about the criteria you are using to evaluate which theories are preferred and to justify your theoretical choices. Scholars differ over which of the criteria is most important in providing a good account of any topic or issue in international relations. These debates about whether theory should promote consistency and coherence or scope and critical self-reflection are sometimes as important as studying aspects of international relations themselves. That is because they determine fundamentally what and how we study.

Explanatory Power If we think explanatory power is what makes for a rigorous theory, then following the scientific method and its systematic use of causal inference whether using quantitative or qualitative methods may be a logical choice of approach (King et  al. 1994). However, interpretive methods of analysis that interrogate historical and institutional meanings and contexts are increasingly used for explanation as well as understanding in IR (Milliken 1999; Klotz and Lynch 2007).

Predictive Power If we think prediction is crucial for a theory, then we may need to invest in the methods of the natural sciences and face frequent failure and falsification of our theories. It is near impossible to control for all the factors affecting outcomes in the social world of international relations. Game theory tries to do this with mathematical formulas drawn from microeconomics. But while there are some rules of behaviour that have evolved in world politics, there are widely varying motivations and non-iterative strategic interactions making the prediction of non-obvious phenomena unlikely. Prediction based on history is also of limited utility. What happened in the past is not a prelude or precise guide to the future given the significant structural changes not only in the world but in how we know it. Glyn Davis (2020) recently argued that ‘the Black death closed permanently five of Europe’s 30 universities in the mid-15th century’ so that ‘we might imagine destruction of similar proportion in the [COVID-19] pandemic’. But the analogy is misplaced. What was a university in the 15th century but small cloisters of religious scholars? The universities of the Renaissance are not akin to the modern university. Moreover, it is naive to think that we could predict what will happen today in a radically changed globalized environment where states are more invested in

Introduction   13

universities. History or historical analysis is not a blueprint for prediction any more than formal modelling, but both types of theorizing can discern patterns, logics and challenges that are common at a level of generality.

Interpretive Power A theory’s capacity to lead us to think differently about the world – captured in the first criterion earlier – or to open up new terrain by generating novel and interesting questions – captured by the fifth criterion – should probably be judged as crucial. As the tumultuous events and new phenomena in world politics in recent years illustrate, International Relations is a dynamic, complex and open-ended field of study. Theories that reveal and highlight new issues and actors or that help us to think differently about enduring issues and actors are vital and have implications for how we individually and collectively act in the world. Such theories may interpret novel or unfamiliar phenomena or offer novel interpretations of familiar phenomena. Either way, how an issue or actor is understood or analysed will depend on how successful and persuasive are the theorist’s acts of interpretation and abstraction.

Intellectual Consistency and Coherence A theory’s consistency and coherence, the fourth criterion, refers to the argumentation from initial assumptions to conclusion, rather than the substance of a theory, and is something that all theories can achieve. At the same time, there may be a trade-off between the coherence and the scope of a theory. All IR theories have diverse versions and expressions. This can be confusing. It makes it difficult to discern what the shared assumptions of a theory are and how far the differences within a theory can go before it becomes incoherent and/or gives rise to another theory. However, we should appreciate that progress in theory – which might be judged in terms of relevance to more phenomena and people – requires conceptual development and an ever-richer set of concepts for understanding. Many sources for conceptual development will come from developments and theories outside International Relations in other realms and disciplines, such as philosophy, law, economics, psychology, as is acknowledged by many IR scholars. IR has been quite eclectic in drawing from these other disciplines, such as intellectual history, political theory, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, geography, anthropology, microeconomics and neuroscience. That syncretism has been key to the growth and globalization of International Relations and its sustained popularity among new generations.

Reflexivity With regard to the sixth criterion, how crucial you think a theory’s capacity for self-reflection and engagement with other theories is will likely depend on how comfortable you are with the assumptions of traditional theories. However, it should be noted that some degree of critical self-reflection on unexamined assumptions and potential unconscious biases can strengthen all theories, including those that privilege hermeneutic understanding of an issue or explanatory power and scope, by encouraging consideration of their blind spots and of new phenomena that have yet to be theorized. As scholars we must take up the challenge of clarifying how our values and intellectual commitments are consistent with our theoretical assumptions and with the scholarly vocation.

14  Theories of International Relations

Considering the different criteria for what constitutes a good or rigorous theory helps us to evaluate theories but it also can inform our theoretical critique. Criticism of a theory can take two forms: first, as an immanent critique from within the perspective based on shared assumptions. For example, realist criticism of traditional balance of power theories for failing to note the diversity of state strategies – balancing, band wagoning or buck-passing for instance – to secure survival in the face of the military power or threat of other states. Second, as a critique launched from outside the perspective, where criticism of basic assumptions is often prominent. Examples are constructivist theories that challenge the assumptions of state identity and national interest or the condition of anarchy underpinning any theory of the balance of power. Regardless of which criteria for evaluating theories seem most compelling, we would expect that on any given question IR scholars would, at a minimum, consider the theoretical perspectives explored in this volume by examining their strengths and weaknesses.

Outline of the Book Reflecting the currency and evolving nature of knowledge about world politics and the globalization of the International Relations discipline, we have refreshed the structure and contents of this volume. In particular, developments inside the discipline and contemporary world politics have made it essential to include new chapters on postcolonialism and institutionalism. There is no longer a chapter on historical sociology, but sociological analysis is reflected in the contents of most chapters in their thoroughly updated versions. Historical sociology is, for instance, an integral part of the new chapter on postcolonialism including with respect to IR theory’s relationship to Eurocentrism and colonial thought. The revised cast of chapters has enabled a tighter focus on distinct theoretical perspectives as well as the overlap between and among them. The order of the chapters somewhat reflects the conventional arrangement of IR courses, but not too much should be read into the order. No chapter ordering is perfect. The underlying premise of the book is that no theory can claim a priori supremacy. While we have not up-ended the dominant narrative of the field and its evolution, we have unsettled it by placing postcolonialism mid-volume, reflecting the major significance of colonialism to any theorizing of world politics, and ensuring that critical theory and feminism come before constructivism, recognizing their chronological antecedence in the field. Green theory features as the last chapter not because it is the least important theoretical addition to IR but because of its salience to the future of international relations and the planet. We fully expect that in future editions there will be an even greater range of theories featured and a reordering as we collectively and perennially rethink the field of International Relations. In the IR discipline, most scholars do not develop or pursue theory for its own sake – as in philosophy or theoretical physics, for example – but rather they aim to use and apply theory with reference to individual and collective action in the world. Politicians are themselves prisoners not of the national interest or of particular inter-state alliance but, as John Maynard Keynes said in 1932, of the ‘academic scribblers of a bygone era’. That is to say, while IR theories may not always have a direct or obvious policy application, their impact on a practical level is vast and largely unrecognized for the way that ideas and argument developed in the academy have shaped the thought and action of political actors. Boxed case studies in this volume are a new feature and are intended to promote thinking about the potential applications of theories. They aim to illustrate how a theory can illuminate an issue or historical event in world politics, but also inspire reflection on the theory’s limitations.

Introduction   15

In addition, one or two key concepts used by each theoretical perspective are explained in detail and set out in the main body of each chapter. A glossary of key terms is provided to further clarify the theoretical language and tools common in each theory. The chapters include a set of further readings in addition to the volume’s substantial bibliography. These readings are recommended as especially useful or as key texts and syntheses of the theory. Following this introduction, Chapter 2 is on realism and neo-realism authored by Jack Donnelly. It sets forth four varieties of realism, classical, structural, augmented structural and neo-classical realism, which nonetheless share family resemblances in their assumptions and self-help and analysis of the politics of power and balancing. The chapter brings the theory to life by analysing the American response to the rise of China. Fear and uncertainty in a world of few international rules are seen as the drivers of power politics, which the COVID-19 global pandemic has made even more apparent. Chapter 3 by Scott Burchill on Liberalism considers three significant contributions of this theory to understanding the causes of war and the prospects of a liberal-democratic peace between states, the importance of liberal ideas of individual freedom, promoting contemporary human rights and economic globalization, particularly via foreign investment and trade liberalization. The chapter argues therefore that liberalism is not just an argument for economic efficiency, but also the conviction that commercial barriers between individuals, erected by states, inhibit the development of a single human political community. A new Chapter 4 by Alina Sajed on postcolonialism provides a crucial re-reading of modern IR, exploring how theory as much as practice has been embedded in colonial projects since the 15th century. IR scholarship over the past two decades especially has theorized the emergence of states through colonization and decolonization processes. This chapter outlines the history of postcolonialism, discussing major historical landmarks associated with the rise of the postcolonial perspective (e.g. Bandung Conference; Non-Aligned Movement; Suez Crisis; Tricontinental Conference) and prominent thinkers who are now seen as ‘foundational’ of postcolonialism (e.g. Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said). It examines key concepts of colonialism, race, Orientalism and epistemic justice, and considers critiques of postcolonial analyses in IR with regard to the issue of indigeneity in the field and the debate between postcolonial and decolonial approaches. In Chapter 5 on the English School Andrew Linklater and André Saramago explore the leading theorists associated with this ‘school’. The tensions among these theorists are crucial in understanding the theory’s contribution to the study of international relations. Key concepts of order and society are examined and how they have shaped unique European debates, including those on the distinction between international and world society, and the priority of order over justice. Lastly, the challenges to the European society of states by non-western states and civilisations, and the potentials for a post-western international society are considered. Chapter 6 also by Linklater and Saramago is focused on Marxism and the significance of historical materialism for international relations. Much thought has to be condensed given the voluminous scholarship on this theory. The chapter describes the Marxist conception of history and its major theoretical innovations of enduring relevance to international relations. It considers the classic theories of imperialism and dependency made famous by Lenin and Latin American scholars respectively as well as contemporary historical materialist approaches applied to international relations, especially neo-Gramscian approaches to global political economy, and the analysis of the uneven and combined capitalist development.

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In Chapter 7, Richard Devetak surveys the contribution of Critical Theory to the study of international relations, its emphasis on emancipation and the ongoing debates around what that means. The origins of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory’s initial reception in IR, especially its focus on the politics of knowledge, are examined. Critical Theory’s wide-­ranging explorations of governing humanity and rethinking political community are further explored. In Chapter 8, Jacqui True explains how feminist perspectives help us to understand and improve international relations by exploring the empirical, analytical and normative contributions of feminism to IR. The chapter considers the development of feminist International Relations and recent advances in the application of feminism to state foreign policies and to international peace and security through the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda. Empirical analyses of global gender dynamics that are explored include gender ideology in violent extremism and terrorism, sexual violence in conflict and gender norms in global economic governance. Gender as a theoretical category is used to interrogate foundational concepts and assumptions of International Relations theories (power, the state, security), and normative feminist debates about gender, intersectionality, knowledge and the possibility for global change are examined. In Chapter 9, Devetak surveys the contribution of post-structuralism to the study of international relations. Post-structuralism is distinguished by the deconstructive strategies and genealogical methods it uses to illuminate the way in which knowledge production interacts with political formations. These strategies have been used to good effect in IR by focusing on themes of violence, boundaries, identity and statecraft as performative acts, thereby yielding insightful critical understandings of the sovereign state. The chapter concludes with a discussion of post-­structuralist ethics and the post-structuralist problematization of the paradigm of sovereignty. Chapter 10 by Christian Reus-Smit explores the nature and development of constructivism in IR, stressing the importance of normative as well as material structures, the role of identity and ideas in shaping political action and the mutually constitutive relationship between agents and structures as demonstrated through a case study of responses to COVID-19. The chapter differentiates between three forms of constructivism, systemic, unit-level and holistic, and reflects on the disagreements within constructivism over theory and methodology. Emotions and practices, as well as theorizing of culture and international orders, are seen as promising current directions for the theory. A new Chapter 11 by Toni Haastrup on institutionalism reflects the concerns of contemporary IR scholarship with the post-war integration (and disintegration) of Europe and the founding of intergovernmental institutions and transnational networks to govern global problems. Institutionalism starts from a core assumption that institutions matter for the functioning of international relations. This chapter extends beyond liberalism to focus on debates from functionalism to multi-level governance, and informal institutions, such as norms and networks in global governance. It explores the utility of ‘new’ institutionalisms as an IR theoretical approach used in European Union studies. In Chapter 12, Matthew Paterson explores green, or ecological, theories drawing on reformist as well as more radical or transformative approaches to global politics. The chapter considers ecocentric ethics, limits to growth, the highly contested notion of the commons and the concept of the Anthropocene in underpinning these approaches. It explores how global politics is being transformed to respond to the rapidly evolving ecological crisis and how climate change has come to represent a unique challenge to global political structures and processes.

Introduction   17

Chapter 13 by Terry Nardin discusses international political theory. This theory is unlike others in the volume because it aims to address many of the questions other theories raise by scrutinising the ethical or normative basis of their arguments. Specifically, the chapter considers moral and political issues, such as, whether wars, unequal distributions of resources and power, and global institutions can be just or deliver justice, taking into account historical contexts. As such, it examines tensions between international and global conceptions of justice, and whether or not a legitimate global order requires universal value or merely toleration of difference, and the implications of these tensions for current international institutions and law.

Conclusion: Next Generation of IR Theorizing? Our world faces novel challenges that are global and universal in nature, and we need theories to help us make sense of – and respond to – them (Burke et al. 2016). But despite the novelty of some of these challenges, some things are constant in international relations. The particular challenges the world faces today are instances of more general phenomena associated with struggles for power, order, justice and freedom among people in a world dominated by nation-states and on a planet of finite resources. There are, however, a number of new challenges confronting the IR scholar today, challenges that are experienced differently and unequally by various groups and individuals, and that intersect with enduring challenges. We can expect that racial injustice, future pandemics, great-power competition, climate change, uneven wealth and income disparity, technological disruptions represented today by the rise of artificial intelligence, shifts in societal gender norms, poor governance and antagonistic leadership, and more will all play a part in reshaping world politics (see Goldgeier and Mezzera 2020). Every generation confronts a different context. This book was first published almost three decades ago in an era of guarded optimism and globalization after the end of the Cold War between two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union. In the Cold War bipolar international system, all efforts to preserve peace were focused on military defence and nuclear deterrence. The range of debates in IR of the time was largely dominated by realist theories focused on geopolitics, diplomacy and war and liberal theories focused on the promotion of liberal principles and practices of world order. By contrast, the collapse of the bipolar world order enabled new theoretical debates to take off, including on the role and epistemological foundations of theory and questioning its predictive power, given the failure to anticipate the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. New theories emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War as theories engaging with realities other than state power, such as globalization, international cooperation, democracy promotion, humanitarianism and environmentalism were sought. Theories such as liberalism (liberal internationalism), institutionalism, green theory and constructivism were increasingly seen as valid, with relevant ‘real world’ applications. The next editions of the book, published in 2001 and 2005 respectively, were cognisant of the changed international context after the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), which represented a direct attack on the heartland of global capitalism and on US military power. The consequent global war on terror led by the USA led to a resurgence of theorizing about state security and terrorism in the IR discipline. Even feminist theories became focused on security studies, founding a subfield, feminist security studies (Sjoberg 2009, 2010; Wibben 2011). Theorizing about the integration and global expansion of economies, the traditional terrain of liberalism and Marxism in

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IR, became a lesser emphasis in the first decade of the 21st century; that is, until the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its aftermath, which saw a return to studying the global political economy. The global financial crisis seemed to repeat the history of the Great Depression, while the institutional response demonstrated how leaders, states and international institutions learned directly from that earlier 20th-century event. The next editions of this volume in 2009 and 2013 grappled with a world where the financial system underpinning the post-war era, and consequent wealth and inequality of states, almost collapsed. Subsequent IR analyses informed by liberalism, institutionalism and Marxism have evaluated the response to the global financial crisis, arguing that the multilateral liberal system that worked (Drezner 2014) or engendered dangerous austerity (Blyth 2013). Above all in this volume, we want to emphasize the relevance of theory as an engaged intellectual activity regardless of the historical context or the current global political and economic challenges. IR theories address enduring questions of identity and belonging, human conflict, competition and cooperation, war and peace. They must also address questions of racial, economic, environmental and gender injustice, which, though never absent from the real world of international relations, have not always been integrated fully into the discipline of IR. How this is best achieved remains an open question and matter of contestation among the competing theories of international relations.

Glossary Terms Epistemology: The theory of knowledge. It is the system of rules, conditions and beliefs that we use to distinguish knowledge from opinion.

Hermeneutic understanding: The non-literal interpretation of the underlying meanings of human actions on their own terms and the products of such actions, most importantly texts including authoritative texts.

Normative: Refers to theory or perspectives that consider what ‘should be’ or is ‘ideal’ based on philosophical and theoretical exploration and conjecture.

Ontology: Our understanding of the things that make up reality. The ontology of international relations is the study of the key elements and actors that constitute international relations.

Praxis: The practice of theorizing and scholarship. Praxis is theory in action and action-oriented theory.

REALISM

JACK DONNELLY

2

Political realism  – Realpolitik, power politics  – is a venerable tradition, going back at least to Thucydides’ History relating to the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce). Realism has also been central to the academic study of international relations (IR) for most of the twentieth century. Serious students should not only acquire an appreciation of political realism but also understand how their own views relate to the realist tradition. Although I am not a realist, I am not an anti-realist either. Realism, I will argue, is a limited yet important approach to (and set of insights about) some parts of IR. This chapter focuses on the variety of contemporary realist theories. I begin by defining realism – or, rather, the range of positions commonly encountered under that rubric – and then, as a concrete example of realist theory in action, look briefly at American realist responses to the rise of China. To provide depth to the argument that realism is a diverse tradition that nonetheless has a certain character or style, the following section looks at leading examples of three types of realism while also highlighting four widely shared emphases. The next to last section focuses on the variety of senses of ‘theory’ employed within the realist tradition (and adds additional depth to the discussions of structural and neo-classical realism, the two most prominent strands of the tradition today). The chapter concludes by emphasizing the centrality of fear and uncertainty in realist arguments – and thus the variable relevance of realism as the world more or less closely resembles a largely lawless international system dominated by a concern for survival. Key Concept: Anarchy Literally, the absence of rule or a ruler. Anarchy, understood as absence of an international government, demarcates IR from domestic politics. Much of IR theory can be seen as a debate over the best strategies for dealing with the problems posed by anarchy  – especially the possibilities of creating

rule-governed international order: governance in the absence of a government. Realists are characteristically pessimistic about accomplishing more than mitigating some of the worst consequences of anarchy, especially in security relations among great powers.

Defining Realism Although definitions of realism differ in detail (see Donnelly 2000: 6–9; Cusack and Stoll 1990: ch. 2), they share a clear family resemblance. For example, William Wohlforth (2008: 133) and Jack Donnelly (2008: 150) in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations present realism as 19

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a theory rooted in groupism (politics takes place within and between groups), egoism (when individuals and groups act politically, they are driven principally by narrow self-interest), and anarchy (the absence of an international government). The intersection of groupism and egoism in an environment of anarchy, realists argue, makes IR, regrettably, largely a politics of power and security. Similarly, Robert Gilpin (1996: 7–8), a leading realist author of the last third of the twentieth century, presents realism as grounded in three fundamental propositions. The basic unit of social and political affairs is the ‘conflict group’. States are motivated primarily by their national interest. Power relations are a fundamental feature of international affairs. John Mearsheimer, who is perhaps the best-known academic realist today, presents a similar list of five core realist propositions. (1994/95: 9–10) The international system is anarchic. States inherently possess some offensive military capability, which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and possibly destroy each other. No state can ever be certain another state will not use its offensive military capability. The most basic motive driving states is survival. States are instrumentally rational. Few ‘non-realists’, however, would deny that anarchy, egoism and power are central to IR. These characteristically ‘realist’ features are not distinctively ‘realist’; they do not demarcate ‘realist’ from ‘non-realist’. Furthermore, terms like ‘primarily’, ‘largely’, ‘most basic’ and ‘fundamental’ obscure exactly what (or how much) is being claimed. This does not, however, make ‘realism’ an empty or confused category. Realism is a complex and diverse family of perspectives, theories and arguments that are regularly employed in IR in patterned ways. Three broad types of realist theories are commonly encountered today. Classical realism gives roughly equal emphasis to the anarchic structure of IR (i.e. the absence of an international government) and the egoism of political actors. Structural realism (also known as neo-realism) argues that the anarchic structure of international politics compels the priority of the pursuit of power even from those who might prefer otherwise. Neo-classical realism starts with structure (defined by anarchy [absence of international government] and polarity [the number of great powers in a system]) but seeks more fully developed analyses by adding additional features such as domestic politics and foreign policy decision-making. In addition, two substantive bodies of realist thought are commonly encountered. Offensive realism, championed especially by John Mearsheimer, argues that states, because they can never be certain that even currently friendly states will not turn against them in the future, seek to maximize their power. In an older idiom, great powers are ‘revolutionary’ or ‘revisionist’ powers seeking to move up, and if possible dominate, the power hierarchy. Defensive realism, associated especially with Kenneth Waltz, holds that rational states in anarchy are principally concerned with retaining (rather than improving) their relative power position. Great powers, in other words, tend to be ‘status quo’ powers. Although Mearsheimer (2001: ch. 1) argues that offensive realism is the best or most authentic version of realism, most contemporary realists (and nearly all non-realists) see this as an empirical rather than a theoretical issue. Some states, as a matter of fact, are status quo powers. Others are revisionists. And a defensive realist world of status quo great powers (which is far less dangerous than a world filled with revisionist states always striving to improve their position) can persist for generations (e.g. in Europe over most of the century following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815).

Realism   21

Box 2.1 Realists Responses to the Rise of China Many realists have weighed in on how to respond to China’s rise as a great power. Although they all see increasing conflict between the United States and China over the coming decades, there are important differences in realist assessments. Mearsheimer paints a bleak picture. ‘To put it bluntly: China cannot rise peacefully’ (2010: 382). This, he argues, is rooted in the fundamental character of anarchic international systems. ‘The best way for any state to ensure its survival is to be much more powerful than all the other states in the system … the ideal situation for any great power is to be the hegemon in the system’ (2010: 397. Cf. 2001: 21). And there is no reason to believe that this is not China’s preferred position. Although global hegemony is out of China’s reach, regional hegemony is a (not un)realistic aspiration that seems consistent with the self-image of China’s rulers and population. This, however, means overturning the existing American-dominated regional security order. And there is no reason to imagine that the United States, which has long arrogated to itself a special regional and global status (2010: 385–387), will accept a fundamental transformation of the regional order. Conflict thus seems inescapable. And such conflict can easily become violent, both because of the high stakes (hegemony) and the particulars of the Sino-American rivalry. (2010: 391–393). China has a variety of vital interests potentially worth fighting for. (There are few more compelling geopolitical interests than control over one’s borders.) China’s hand is strengthened by the fact that America’s European allies have few vital interests in the region. And despite China’s central role in the global economy, Mearsheimer argues that ‘economic interdependence does not have a significant effect on geopolitics one way or the other’ (2010: 393). Mearsheimer thus concludes: ‘international politics is a nasty and dangerous business and no amount of good will can ameliorate the intense security competition that sets in when an aspiring hegemon appears in Eurasia. And there is little doubt that there is one on the horizon’ (2010: 396). One obvious problem with this argument is that it does not consider the responses of threatened states. If, as realists argue (see below), the fundamental logic of anarchic IR is balancing power against power, then a Chinese move towards

regional hegemony will provoke a near-­universal anti-hegemonic alliance. Therefore, China, knowing that it will meet such a response and uncertain about its ability to overcome it, may opt for nonviolent transformations that leave it short of hegemony. This would, at the very least, reduce the likelihood of war (by reducing the stakes for both the United States and China). Stephen Walt responds to this argument by emphasizing the collective action problems that are likely to be encountered in creating and maintaining such an anti-hegemonic alliance. (2018: 26–27). In addition to the ordinary problems of free-riding (i.e. contributing less than one’s share in the hope that others, who also depend on the good, will make up the difference), there are also lingering historical animosities, especially between Japan and South Korea. In addition, China’s neighbours are pulled in the opposite direction by their extensive economic ties with China. (I would add that the apparent unreliability of the United States, evidenced by the Trump administration, is a further problem of considerable significance.) Walt thus also concludes that ‘realism offers a gloomy forecast for the future of Sino-American relations and the future of Asian security’ (2018: 28). But, he adds, although ‘the potential for trouble is growing’ (2018: 29) peaceful balancing may be possible. This also is the conclusion of America’s bestknown realist, Henry Kissinger, who subtitles his article ‘The Future of U.S.–Chinese Relations’ ‘Conflict Is a Choice, Not a Necessity’ (2012). Like many other classical realists, Kissinger argues that sound diplomacy, based on a recognition of the ‘realities’ of IR, can make the world a somewhat less dangerous, and sometimes actually quite liveable, place (at least for those with the power to protect their vital national interests). There is no single realist position on this (or any other) substantive issue of IR. There is, however, a clear realist sensibility that focuses on the problems posed by rising powers in a states system lacking an international government  – and the impediments to effective international cooperation, especially in security affairs, posed both by the need of each state to take care of itself and by the pressure to see other states as not merely rivals but (actual or potential) enemies.

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Exemplary Realist Arguments Those interested in starting with a concrete example of realist theory in action should first read the text box on the rise of China (Box 2.1). This section emphasizes both the variety of realist arguments and the fact that they nonetheless share certain common features. In particular, it looks briefly at examples of leading classical and structural realist theories (Thomas Hobbes and Kenneth Waltz) and introduces neo-classical realism – while also drawing attention to four characteristic arguments made by realists of varying stripes.

The Hobbesian State of Nature Chapter 13 of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, published in 1651, provides an unusually clear and influential classical realist model based on three simple assumptions. (1) Men are equal. The gendered language reflects standard seventeenth-century usage. We might, however, see the analysis – particularly Hobbes’ assumptions about the overriding motives of ‘men’ – as more deeply gendered, reflective of a particular masculinist perspective (see (Tickner 1988) and [cross reference to True chapter]); (2) They interact in the absence of a government; (3) They are driven by competition, diffidence and glory. The conjunction of these conditions, Hobbes argues, leads to a war of all against all. To strip away the effects of social convention and get at ‘the natural condition of mankind’ (which is the title of the chapter), Hobbes employs the analytical device of the state of nature, an imagined pre-social condition that states in IR resemble in important ways. Men, Hobbes argues, are naturally equal. (Even ‘the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others’ (par. 1). ‘From this equality of ability, arises equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends’ (par. 3). Each of us, considering ourselves at least as good as everyone else, expects to have at least as much as anyone else. Scarcity, however, makes this impossible. The resulting frustration generates enmity; a desire to ‘destroy, or subdue one another’ (par. 3) – which leads to fear and uncertainty. In addition to being fearful, men, Hobbes argues, are also naturally competitive and vain. ‘In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, makes men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation’ (par. 6–7). Hobbes then specifies the environment in which such men interact: it is anarchic, in the literal sense of lacking a government (without ‘archy’, rule). They ‘live without a common Power to keep them all in awe’ (par. 8). This conjunction of anarchy, egoism, and equality, Hobbes argues, inescapably creates a state of war ‘of every man against every man. For WAR, consists not in Battle only … but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary’ (par. 8). In the absence of a government, any conflict readily degenerates into violence. And with prosperity, freedom, and even survival on the line, preparing for the worst is the only reasonable course. Therefore, ‘every man is Enemy to every man’ (par. 9) – not because they are particularly evil, but because equal, selfish, fearful and vain men in anarchy cannot reasonably see one another as anything other than an enemy (if not now, then in the future). Hobbes, of course, recognizes another side to human nature. There are ‘passions that incline men to Peace … Fear of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them’ (par. 14). We also have reason, which ‘suggests

Realism   23

convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement’ (par. 14). In the absence of enforcement, though, agreements are fragile, making cooperation risky – and thus rare. And Hobbes argues that, at least outside of society, the passions that incline us to peace are less powerful than those that incline us to enmity (and, in anarchy, war). The state of nature is regularly ‘escaped’ by the creation of society. But societies – states, in contemporary IR – are left in a similar situation. And those states, both by inclination and driven by the pressures of anarchy, act principally out of fear and a desire for gain, making IR, many realists argue, very similar to the Hobbesian state of nature.

Waltzian Structural Realism Structural realists, rather than appealing to human nature as classical realists do, make a few assumptions about states – typically, that they seek survival and security above all other concerns. This focuses attention on how international anarchy (the absence of an international government) compels such states, whatever their other interests and internal differences, to behave in patterned ways. Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, published in 1979, dominated academic IR well into the 1990s and remains today the most influential work in the discipline. Key Concept: Levels of Analysis Degrees of abstraction  – or, in the case of social political levels, degrees of aggregation or disaggregation. In IR it is common to distinguish individual, state and international/system levels. (Additional sub-national and supranational levels

seem necessary to comprehend globalization.) Explanations that rely on factors at, for example, the individual level (e.g. leadership psychology) will be very different than those at, say, the system level (e.g. the balance of power).

Waltz cast his theory at the level of the international system. Abstracting from the particular characteristics of states and individuals, he sought to explain ‘a few big and important things’ about IR (1986: 329) and the ‘striking sameness in the quality of international life through the millennia’ (1979: 66) solely through the structure of international systems. Political structures, Waltz (1979: ch. 5) argues, are defined by their ordering principle, functional differentiation and distribution of capabilities. An ordering principle establishes how authority is allocated in the system. Political actors, Waltz argues, either stand in relations of super- and subordination or they do not. He labels these ordering principles hierarchy and anarchy and argues that national political systems are hierarchic and international political systems are anarchic. Political structures are also defined by how functions are allocated; by the division of political labour. In hierarchic systems, one’s place in the hierarchy and one’s functions (roles) are closely interrelated. Functional differentiation, however, requires actors to depend on one another to perform their assigned tasks. In anarchy, Waltz argues, such dependence is too risky. Each state instead must ‘put itself in a position to be able to take care of itself since no one else can be counted on to do so’ (1979: 107). Therefore, ‘national politics consists of differentiated units performing specified functions. International politics consists of like units duplicating one another’s activities’ (1979: 97). The distribution of capabilities among the actors is the third element of Waltzian political structures. If all international systems are, by definition, anarchic and if anarchic orders have minimal

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functional differentiation, then international systems differ structurally only in how power is distributed. Contemporary IR typically measures distribution of capabilities by polarity; the number of great powers in the system. Polarity influences the particular character of international systems. (For example, in bipolar systems conflict between the superpowers tends to be displaced into the peripheries.) Most of the analytical work in structural realist accounts, however, is done by anarchy. Realists (as well as many non-realists) regularly emphasize the pernicious effects of anarchy; its dangers, hazards, perils and violent consequences. Note, though, that Waltz defines anarchy both as the absence of a government and as the absence of hierarchy (see, for example, 1979: 88, 89, 93, 97, 100–104, 114–116). All international political systems, by definition, lack an international government. But almost all have an important dimension of hierarchy. For example, great power states systems are defined by the formal hierarchical superordination of states over non-state actor and the (at least informal) superiority of great powers over lesser powers. (Although great powers are roughly equal to each another, the system is hierarchical: authority is concentrated in states and capabilities are concentrated in great powers.) Therefore, it seems to me best to read structural realism as a theory of the effects of the absence of an international government. From this simple model – self-interested states, fearing for their survival, interacting without an international government – Waltz identifies patterns of politics that emerge (unintentionally but inescapably). In particular, balances of power form and states must be particularly concerned with their relative power – conclusions that most realists of other stripes also endorse.

Characteristic Realist Propositions Classical and structural realists, for all their differences, typically draw attention to a small set of widely shared propositions. Here I identify four.

Self-Help Anarchy (the absence of an international government) creates ‘self-help’ systems. With no higher authority to provide protection, states are compelled to rely on their own devices to safeguard their interests. As Hobbes puts it, ‘men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish’. Self-help may in principle be individual or collective (e.g. creating international institutions). Realists, however, argue that the difficulties of collective action in anarchy largely restrict self-help to unilateral and bilateral action (or limited collective action with small groups of allies).

Cooperation and Conflict Whatever their views on human nature, contemporary realists argue that anarchy is a powerful impediment to cooperation. Prisoners’ Dilemma provides a standard illustration. Imagine two criminals taken in separately by the police for questioning. Each is offered a favourable plea bargain in return for testimony against the other. Without a confession, though, they can only be convicted of a lesser crime. Each thus must choose, without knowledge of the action of the other, between cooperating (remaining silent) and defecting (testifying). Imagine also that both have the following preference ordering: (1) confess while the other remains silent; (2) both remain silent; (3) both confess; (4) remain silent while the other confesses. Assume finally that their aversion to risk takes

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a particular form: they want to minimize their maximum possible loss; that is, protect themselves against the worst possible outcome (Jervis 1978: 170–174). Cooperating (remaining silent) offers both parties their second-best choice (conviction on the lesser charge). But cooperating is the only way to end up with the worst possible outcome (serving a long prison term, knowing that your partner put you there). Each, though, can, in effect, take out insurance against disaster by confessing (defecting). The rational choice thus is to defect even though both know that they both could be better off by cooperating. Both end up with their third (rather than their second) choice, because this is the only way to guarantee avoiding the worst possible outcome. Conflict here does not arise from any special defect in the actors. (They are mildly selfish but not evil or vicious.) Far from desiring conflict, both prefer cooperation. And they are neither ignorant nor ill informed. Nonetheless, they remain locked into mutually destructive competition. (For example, states may engage in costly and even counter-productive arms races because arms control agreements cannot be independently verified or enforced.) Herbert Butterfield calls this ‘Hobbesian fear’. ‘If you imagine yourself locked in a room with another person with whom you have often been on the most bitterly hostile terms in the past, and suppose that each of you has a pistol, you may find yourself in a predicament in which both of you would like to throw the pistols out of the window, yet it defeats the intelligence to find a way of doing it’ (1949: 89–90). The ‘security dilemma’ (Jervis 1978; Glaser 1997) has a similar logic. ‘Given the irreducible uncertainty about the intentions of others, security measures taken by one actor are perceived by others as threatening; the others take steps to protect themselves; these steps are then interpreted by the first actor as confirming its initial hypothesis that the others are dangerous; and so on in a spiral of illusory fears and “unnecessary” defenses’ (Snyder 1997: 17).

Balancing Realists especially emphasize the self-help strategy of balancing; counterposing power against power. This is particularly clear in the case of a rising power, where others must choose between strategies that Waltz calls bandwagoning and balancing. In domestic political systems, adversaries tend to ‘jump on the bandwagon’ of a leading candidate or recent victor, attempting to increase their gains (or reduce their losses) by aligning with the stronger party. This is safe because one’s life and prosperity are not at stake. In anarchy, however, bandwagoning courts disaster by strengthening a state that later may turn on you. The power of others – especially great power – is always a threat when there is no government to turn to for protection. Balancers attempt to reduce their risk by opposing a rising party. Weak states, which cannot alter the balance, can only hope that early alignment with what becomes the winning side will bring favourable treatment. Only a foolish great power, though, would accept such a risk. Great powers in anarchy, realists argue, balance power with power either internally (by reallocating resources from other uses to national security) or externally – borrowing rather than building power – through alliances and similar agreements.

Relative Gains Anarchic pressures towards balancing and against cooperation are reinforced by the relativity of power. Power understood as control over outcomes  – ‘the ability to do or effect something’

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(Oxford English Dictionary) – is less a matter of absolute capabilities (how much ‘stuff’ one has) than relative capabilities. For example, a machine gun is pretty powerful facing an unarmed man but of negligible power facing an armoured brigade. The relativity of power, Waltz argues (1979: 106), requires states in anarchy to ‘be more concerned with relative strength than with absolute advantage’. (Bandwagoning seeks absolute gains. Balancing pursues relative gains.) This further impedes cooperation. One must consider not only whether one gains but whether one’s gains outweigh those of others. Even predatory cooperation is problematic unless it maintains the relative capabilities of the predators. States may even be satisfied with outcomes that leave them absolutely worse off – so long as their adversaries are left even worse off. All other things being equal, states want more. But above all they do not want to unfavourably alter the gap with their adversaries. (Offensive and defensive realists differ as to whether rational states are primarily gap maximizers or gap maintainers.) Whether states in fact pursue absolute gains at the cost of relative position is an empirical question. But striking examples such as the response of Western powers to the rise of China in the 1990s and 2000s, which effectively prioritized absolute gains (cheap Chinese goods) over relative power position, suggest problems in this realist story. Painting such responses as misguided, even irrational, reflects a prescriptive theory about how states ought to act. Most academic realists, though, see realism as an explanatory theory; political science rather than political philosophy. The rise of China thus poses theoretical problems that require going beyond simple models such as Hobbes’ and Waltz’s  – which brings us to neo-­ classical realism.

Neo-classical Refinements of the Balancing Logic Neo-classical realists seek to provide richer (and more accurate) accounts of state behaviour by adding variables at the levels of states and individuals. Neo-classical accounts of ‘underbalancing’ help to explain Western responses to China in the 1990s and 2000s. States often balance less than would be expected of fully rational realists. For example, because even external balancing has financial (and other) costs, politicians, especially in democratic states, face pressures not to spend enough on security. Randall Schweller, in Unanswered Threats (2006), develops a neo-classical realist theory of underbalancing focusing on elite consensus and cohesion (which affect the willingness of states to balance) and regime vulnerability and social cohesion (which affect a state’s ability to extract the resources necessary to balance). More generally, structure only allows us to predict that balances will form (Waltz 1979: 118, 119, 124, 126). What we really want to know, though, is which balances form (in what ways). For that we need to drop down from the system level to national- and individual-level factors. For example, Stephen Walt, one of Waltz’s first PhD students following the publication of Theory of International Politics, found that states balance not against power but against threats (Walt 1987). (Compare American behaviour towards British, French and Chinese  – or Israeli, Indian, and North Korean – nuclear arsenals, which weigh about equally in the global distribution of capabilities.) Threat, though, is a perceptual national- or individual-level variable – making balance of threat theory a neo-classical, rather than structural, realist theory. We will return to neo-classical realism below. Here I simply note that the approach makes a trade-off in eschewing purely structural explanations. Adding additional variables provides greater

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depth, precision or accuracy. Such explanations, however, have a narrower range of application and usually require more knowledge to make predictions. Conversely, Waltz’s minimalist structural explanations aim to apply to all international systems. But they either ground few determinate predictions (a point to which we will return below) or predict with unfortunately low accuracy (because crucial explanatory variables are left out of account).

Morality and Foreign Policy In popular and policy discussions, ‘realist’ often refers to arguments against pursuing moral objectives in IR. Although such arguments are not particularly prominent among contemporary academic realists, they are central to foreign policy realism not only in the United States but in Europe and elsewhere as well. Realists often argue that ‘universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states’ (Morgenthau 1954: 9). ‘The actions of states are determined not by moral principles and legal commitments but by considerations of interest and power’ (Morgenthau 1970: 382). ‘States in anarchy cannot afford to be moral. The possibility of moral behavior rests upon the existence of an effective government that can deter and punish illegal actions’ (Art and Waltz 1983: 6). Such claims, however, are obviously false. Just as individuals may behave morally in the absence of government enforcement of moral or legal rules, states can and often do act out of moral concerns. Consider, for example, the outpouring of international aid in the wake of natural disasters, efforts to combat preventable childhood diseases, support for democratization or the humanitarian interventions in Kosovo, East Timor and Darfur (however tardy and limited). It simply is not true that ‘the system forces states to behave according to the dictates of realism, or risk destruction’ (Mearsheimer 1995: 91). Many moral foreign policy objectives pose no risk to national survival. And most other national interests do not have the pre-emptive priority of survival. Normative concerns, it is true, are rarely the sole motive of any foreign policy action. The same is true, though, of many (most?) private moral actions. And most of foreign policy is driven by the intersection of multiple interests and motives of diverse types. Pursuing moral objectives may be costly. But so can pursuing economic objectives. The proper course is not to categorically exclude costly objectives but rather to pursue their costs and benefits. (Note also that there is nothing distinctively realist about insisting that foreign policy should be based on rational calculations of costs and benefits.) Realists also often stress the constraints imposed by the office of the statesman. For example, George Kennan, the leading American realist scholar-practitioner in the decades following the Second World War, argues that the ‘primary obligation’ of any government ‘is to the interests of the national society it represents’ and that therefore ‘the same moral concepts are no longer relevant to it’ (1954: 48; 1985/86: 206). Hans Morgenthau even talks of ‘the autonomy of politics’ (1954: 12). Political leaders do indeed have an ethical obligation to further the national interest (much as lawyers in adversarial legal systems have an ethical obligation to pursue the interests of their clients, often even when they conflict with justice or truth). This, however, is an ethical obligation (not a demand for a value-free foreign policy). It is not the exclusive obligation of national leaders. Foreign policy does not solely, or even primarily, involve discharging obligations. And, in any case, the

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national interest is what the nation is interested in  – what it values  – which often includes the rights, interests or well-being of non-nationals and values such as justice, sustainable development or racial, ethnic and religious equality.

Varieties of Realist Theories and Explanations In this section I am concerned less with the substance of particular realist theories than with clarifying the range and character of the kinds of explanations typically proffered by realists.

Realist ‘Theories’ What kind of a ‘thing’ is realism? One obvious answer is ‘theory’, in the broad sense of abstracted generalizations of analytical or explanatory value; artful abstraction that draws attention away from the welter of ‘confusing details’ and towards what is ‘most important’. ‘Theories’, however, come in many forms. I identify five broad senses that are commonly employed within the realist tradition (and in other theoretical traditions as well). Traditions are persistent discursive communities and their associated bodies of work, ‘defined’ by characteristic analytical perspectives and practices expressed in shared parameters of conversation, characteristic elements and arguments and exemplary authors and texts. The realist tradition is almost universally recognized as central to the academic discipline of IR (which it long pre-dates). Theories narrowly understood – explanatory theories – explain regularities by showing them to be effects of underlying relations of cause or interdependency. Theories thus understood provide substantive explanations of patterned events. Structural realism is usually understood as a theory in this sense. Models, as I will use the term here, are interconnected analytical elements that say something significant about cause, process, mechanism or outcome. Although more like theories than traditions, models are too incomplete or underspecified to provide useful explanations without (often considerable) supplementation. Structural realism, I argue below, is a model. Schools are narrower communities of practice defined by a shared substance. (Many traditions have multiple schools. Consider, for example, the many schools of Islamic jurisprudence.) Structural realism can be read as a school (with offensive and defensive variants). Approaches are communities of practice defined ‘methodologically’ by shared analytical orientations and practices (rather than by shared substance). Neo-classical realism is an approach. Although these categories should not be taken too seriously – the dividing lines are not sharp and other fruitful categorizations are possible – this typology does help to clarify the diversity of forms of realist ‘theories’ commonly encountered in contemporary IR. I also think that it is useful for thinking more broadly about the nature of ‘theory’ and ‘theories’ in IR.

Realist Explanations vs. Explanations that Employ Realist Elements Explanations that simply employ ‘characteristically realist’ factors or forces are not ‘realist’ in a strong sense – especially when those factors, such as power or self-interest, are not distinctively

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realist; do not demarcate realism from non-realism. Therefore, there often is no sharp distinction between realist and non-realist arguments. For example, both structural realism and neo-liberal institutionalism (cross-reference to institutions chapter) begin with anarchy and the problems it poses. How a state responds to external power in anarchy, however, is crucial. One common response is to create rules and institutions to constrain or redirect power. Another is to pit power against power. And actual great powers regularly employ both – often at the same time. Neo-liberal institutionalism and structural realism thus provide different kinds of explanations of different kinds of responses to some common problems posed by anarchy. Similarly, most of the ‘non-structural’ factors employed in neo-classical realist explanations are also widely employed by a great variety of other theories or perspectives. Nonetheless, we regularly (and I think rightly) describe neo-classical realism as a realist approach. Realist arguments, rather than employ distinguishing elements or reach distinctive conclusions, are guided by and reflective of a realist tradition. It matters, centrally, that structural and neo-­ classical realists operate (and see themselves as operating) within the realist tradition, from which they draw their analytical frames, positive and negative heuristics, ‘unthinking’ analytical and substantive predispositions, and so forth. And it matters, centrally, that neo-liberal institutionalists, whose work might seem ‘very similar’ employ different frames, for different purposes, to reach different conclusions (or the same conclusion by a different route) – and that they have different understandings of the meaning and significance of their accounts. There are no ‘realist conclusions’ separate from the (realist) path(s) that produce them. And the fact that a conclusion is commonly reached by realists does not make that conclusion distinctively realist. For example, Walt argues that ‘realism’s emphasis on the central role of power and the destabilizing effects of change receives considerable support from the historical record’ (2018: 19). But pretty much every student of IR sees power as central and change as (almost by definition) destabilizing. Walt also argues that ‘if China’s economic and military power continues to increase, realism predicts that the United States and China will increasingly see each other as rivals and will engage in more intense security competition’ (2018: 22). But I am aware of no serious student of IR who would predict otherwise. Walt also argues that ‘realism predicts an intensifying security competition between Beijing and Washington. Instead of a direct clash of arms, however, this competition is likely to consist primarily of a competition for allies and influence’ (2018: 23). But many non-realists agree with this – and realists like Mearsheimer disagree. And it is at best obscure how ‘realism’ predicts this. Because realism provides complete and distinctive explanations of few, if any important features of IR, little of IR is realism’s exclusive provenance. Conversely, because most particular policies, actions, outcomes or explanations can be reached by a variety of paths, how one gets there (or explains getting there) is essential to whether it ‘is realist’ (or not). The central presence of ‘characteristically realist’ actions, outcomes, variables or conclusions may make an explanation compatible with realism. Explanations, however, do not sort neatly into realist and not realist. Many explanations draw on both realist and non-realist theories and perspectives. And it is common for realist and non-realist explanations of ‘the same thing’ to be valid, accurate or true. Realists have a ‘story’ – or, rather, a genre (or genres) of stories – about IR. These stories typically draw on a stock of situations, characters, themes, tropes, plot devices and conclusions.

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If stories in other genres have certain similarities, though, that does not make them ‘realist’. (That a pear is like an apple does not make it an apple.) Even self-conscious borrowing from the realist repertoire does not necessarily make a story realist. Imagine a continuum. Towards one end, certain non-realist explanations can be described as converging with, having certain similarities to, or being compatible with realist explanations (in the strong sense). Towards the other end, non-realist explanations can be described as not incompatible with realism – before we move to explanations that are unconnected with, or even opposed to, realist explanations.

Structural Realism: Indeterminate Predictions Having distinguished various types of realist and non-realist theories and arguments, this and the following sub-sections apply these categories to structural and neo-classical realism. My aims are to further elaborate the diversity of realist arguments; get a deeper appreciation of the character of these leading realist approaches; and better understand the often-complex relations between realist and non-realist arguments. Structural realism, as we saw above, defines international political structures sparsely but exhaustively by anarchy and the distribution of capabilities. This account of structure has been subjected to devastating criticism since at least the early 1990s. In particular, the so-called effects of anarchy are not effects of anarchy, as Alexander Wendt conclusively demonstrated in (1992): politics in anarchic orders differs systematically when actors are ‘enemies’ out to destroy each other, ‘rivals’ who compete but do not threaten each other’s survival, or ‘friends’ who have renounced force in their relations. We have also long known that purportedly structural arguments regularly rely on non-­structural features of the actors or the environment in which they interact. We will return to this point in the next sub-section. Here I focus instead on Waltz’s argument (1979: 71, 122, 124, 134; 1986: 343) that structural realism provides ‘indeterminate’ predictions. Indeterminate predictions claim that in some significant (but unknown and probably unknowable) number of instances the predicted outcome can be expected to occur, at some unspecified (and probably unspecifiable) times, in unspecified ways. Sometimes, somewhere, some things somehow turn out ‘as predicted’. Sometimes, though, for unexplained (and, from within the theory, inexplicable) reasons, things turn out otherwise. This, however, is held not to count against the theory. Heads I win. Tails we flip again. Furthermore, such ‘indeterminate predictions’ provide no explanation. To explain, as Waltz puts it, is ‘to say why the range of expected outcomes falls within certain limits; to say why patterns of behavior recur; to say why events repeat themselves’ (1979: 69). ‘Indeterminate predictions’ tell us only what, not why. They are mere correlations – and ‘spurious’ correlations at that. Anarchy is a feature of all international systems. Therefore, it is correlated with any (all) patterned behaviours or outcomes – and thus explains none. Anarchy tells us nothing about why this happened instead of that (which is also correlated with anarchy). For example, Waltz does not argue that states do balance. ‘Only a loosely defined and inconstant condition of balance is predicted’ (1979: 124). But as long as a ‘world hegemony’ (Waltz 1979: 124), global empire or a world state does not arise – that is, as long as a states system remains a states system – almost any outcome is (not in)consistent with structural realism’s balancing prediction.

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Structural ‘explanations’ cannot be rescued by arguing that anarchy is a ‘permissive cause’ of, for example, war; a feature without which war could not occur; a necessary condition for war (Waltz 1959: 232–234). Peace, however, is far more frequent than war in many anarchic systems. But anarchy cannot account for how, when or why either war or peace occurs. A constant (anarchy) cannot explain variable outcomes (war and peace). Anarchy, rather than a master causal variable, is a background condition that poses problems that can be addressed in various ways. Alone it explains nothing. And even in conjunction with polarity it can account for only a tiny slice of IR.

Augmented Structural Realism Therefore, even self-identified structural realists rarely if ever offer purely structural explanations. For example, Mearsheimer, the leading American academic realist of the generation following Waltz, devotes a crucial chapter of his major book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) to ‘the primacy of land power’ and emphasizes ‘the stopping power of water’. Nonetheless, Mearsheimer insists (2001: 21) that ‘[his] theory of offensive realism is also [like Waltzian defensive realism] a structural theory of international politics’ – despite the fact that structure include only the distribution of capabilities (not the substance of power). Even Waltz regularly left structural accounts behind – out of a (sensible) desire to say something more than that balances tend to form. For example, his explanation of the Cold War peace (1990) relied centrally, even primarily, on nuclear weapons. And despite claiming to ‘abstract from every attribute of states except their capabilities’ (1979: 99), his theory, is, as he himself puts it, ‘based on assumptions about states’ (1996: 54) and ‘built up from the assumed motivations of states’ (1979: 118) – because nothing can be predicted about the behaviour of inert, characterless units. There is nothing wrong with refining or supplementing structural theories. (Quite the contrary, it usually produces better explanations.) Problems arise, though, when realists don’t address the implications of combining structural and non-structural elements in a model, theory or explanation – or, even worse, when non-structural additions are not acknowledged. For example, Mearsheimer (2001: 10) argues that ‘structural factors such as anarchy and the distribution of power … matter most for explaining international politics’. But he merely asserts this conclusion, rather than argue for it (let alone support it by empirical evidence). And anarchy and the distribution of capabilities actually do little of the explanatory work in his account. The structure of the international system forces states which seek only to be secure nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other. Three features of the international system combine to cause states to fear one another: 1) the absence of a central authority that sits above states and can protect them from each other, 2) the fact that states always have some offensive military capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be certain about other states’ intentions. Given this fear – which can never be wholly eliminated – states recognize that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. (Mearsheimer 2001: 2) Note the shift from ‘the structure of the international system’ to ‘features of the international system’. And two of those three features (offensive military capabilities and uncertainty over intentions) are not structural.

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Or consider survival. Waltz claims (1979: 121) that ‘balance-of-power politics prevail wherever two, and only two, requirements are met: that the order be anarchic and that it be populated by units wishing to survive’. A mere desire to survive, however, does not produce balancing in anarchy. Only when that desire is paramount or pre-emptive is a prediction of balancing valid. And when it is not – which is typical in most of contemporary IR – a desire to survive explains almost nothing. The tendency to rely on non-structural supplements is nearly universal because ‘structural realism’ is actually, in the terms developed above, a model rather than a theory; a set of elements that addresses causes, processes, or outcomes (but alone do not explain). And Waltz’s model is what is sometimes called a ‘toy model’; a deliberately simplistic account that may even fundamentally misrepresent something in order to facilitate understanding some part of it (or facilitate ‘as if’ predictions). Such models need to be more or less extensively supplemented to produce actual explanations. But these non-structural additions, even when they are acknowledged, are added in a way that is not governed by the model. The resulting theories or explanations can best be described as augmented structural realism (which can be seen as a kind of neo-classical realism that relies relatively heavily on structure). Patrick James (1993) describes this kind of research strategy as ‘elaborated structural realism’. But it involves not further elaboration of the elements or character of structure but non-structural additions. Augmented structural realism thus seems to me a better description. Augmented structural realism can fruitfully be seen as a realist ‘school’. The choice of additional elements and the ways in which they are deployed are guided by the realist tradition. But, as I emphasized above, the realist contribution lies not in the elements employed (either individually or in combination) but in shaping, applying and interpreting the theory or explanation.

Neo-classical Realism Neo-classical realism, as we saw above, is differentiated by where it looks for explanations. Structure moves to the background and attention is focused on individuals, states and their interactions. Neo-classical realism is, in the language I introduced above, a (methodological) approach rather than a (substantive) school. Structure concerns the arrangement of the parts of a system; the relations between them. What occurs within states and how states interact are ‘not structural’. As Waltz puts it (1979: 80), ‘structure is sharply distinguished from actions and interactions’. We can thus distinguish two broad types of neo-classical realism, which focus on state interactions and on decision-making within states. For example, Glenn Snyder’s Alliance Politics (1997: esp. ch. 1) explores systematic differences in interactions between allies and adversaries. ‘If, as Waltz says, system structures only “shape and shove”, [alignment and similar variables] give a more decided push’ (Snyder 1997: 32). For example, Snyder argues (1997: fig. 1.2) that adversaries tend to deal with armaments through (competitive) arms races and (cooperative) arms control but that allies tend to rely on (cooperative) burden sharing and (competitive) free riding. Similarly, adversaries in security affairs compete through threats of force and cooperate through concessions whereas allies cooperate through promises of support and compete through threats of defection. The other style of neo-classical realist work focuses on foreign policy decision-making. Such work comes in narrow and broad forms. In the narrow form, modestly augmented structural

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realism provides a rationalist model that sets a baseline of expectations. The focus then becomes explaining deviations from these expectations. Structural realism becomes a heuristic device, throwing up ‘puzzles’ or ‘anomalies’ (such as underbalancing) to be explored non-structurally (with a realist style or sensibility). The broad form treats anarchy and external material power as parameters within which decisionmakers operate. The immediate sources of explanation lie in the full range of non-structural ­variables that foreign policy analysis regularly employs. For example, Norrin Ripsman, Jeffrey Taliaferro and Stephen Lobell (2016) develop a fairly complex theory (I would say model) that focuses on how structural stimuli are processed through perception, decision-making and policy implementation (which in turn are influenced by leader images, strategic culture, state–society relations and domestic institutions). Although such explanations are rendered realist by the emphasis on external material power in anarchy, the explanatory variables employed have no substantive focus or coherence. (To repeat, neo-classical realism is a methodological approach not a substantive school.) We thus know very little about an explanation, and nothing about its substance, simply knowing that it is a neo-­ classical realist explanation. Furthermore, the wide range of non-structural additions bear most of the explanatory burden. The resulting explanations usually are eclectic or multi-perspectival. And just what is (and is not) ‘realist’ in such explanations – and how they differ from (often-similar) non-realist explanations – usually is obscure.

Fear, Uncertainty and the Future of Realist Theories Despite my emphasis on the diversity of realist explanations, I want to finish this chapter by suggesting that a fairly clear vision of the nature of IR runs through all varieties of realism – and suggests something about the fate of realist theories in the coming decades. My account of that ‘core’, however, is not centred on anarchy. Most realists, it seems to me, implicitly imagine IR as a world of self-interested states operating in a states system (i.e. an international system structured around states, which are its predominant actors). (Waltz and Mearsheimer are almost explicit about this.) This implicit realist states system has a narrow, thin and weak normative-institutional structure. And states rely largely on individual and bilateral self-help to make and enforce rules and agreements. This thin and weak system of rules (and the associated weak system of international governance), rather than the mere absence of an international government, pushes states towards power politics. And it does so by inducing fear and uncertainty (which are distinct problems that become especially acute when they interact and reinforce one another). What is frightening is not a world without an international government but one with few international rules and minimal international rule. Neo-liberal institutionalists (and many others), by contrast, envision an international system composed of both states and (public and private) non-state actors, whose capabilities and authorities differ from issue area to issue area. This model international system has a fairly robust normative-­ institutional structure that provides an extensive system of rules and considerable international rule in many issue areas. Fear and uncertainty – and the resulting pressures towards self-help balancing

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and power politics – thus regularly mitigated, sometimes successfully managed and occasionally even effectively eliminated. International systems, I am suggesting, diverge most fundamentally in their normative-­ institutional structures. (This should not be surprising. International systems are social systems. And social systems are differentiated primarily by their norms and institutions.) ‘Realist’ ‘effects of anarchy’, such as self-help balancing, arise from a minimal institutional-­ normative structure (that is facilitated or enabled, but not caused, by the absence of an international government). And those effects work through fear and uncertainty, the nature and intensity of which vary considerably with time, place and case – making realism’s contribution to understanding any particular international action or outcome thus becomes, appropriately, an empirical question. Realism is a set of theories, models and perspectives that are ‘tuned’ to operate in – and provide particular perspectives on – international systems populated principally by states that feel deeply threatened by one another. Particularly when survival seems at stake, everything else goes out of the window and power politics prevails. But in most of contemporary IR nothing close to survival is at stake – making realism of limited contemporary relevance. Circumstances, however, can change – making realism more or less relevant. In the immediate post-Cold War world, IR seemed to many states and their citizens, especially (but not only) in the West, to have become much less dangerous. Attention thus was focused on the extensive body of cooperation – and the rules and institutions that sustained such cooperation. Over the past few years, though, forces such as China’s growing power, Russian adventurism, rising nationalism and populism and the incoherent foreign policy of the Trump administration have produced a resurgence (or deepening) of fear – and with it, interest in realism. Furthermore, despite realism’s waxing and waning relevance, the features of IR that realists highlight (such as anarchy, egoism, self-help, balancing and the pursuit of power) do seem to be perennial elements of IR. Therefore, the realist tradition, love it or hate it – or, as I would suggest, use it when it helps you to understand a problem you are interested in – is almost certainly here to stay. Its contribution, though, depends on the type of ‘realist theory’ being employed, the question being addressed and the actual empirical conditions of the part of the particular international system under investigation.

Glossary Terms Anarchy: As a term of art in IR, anarchy is understood as the absence of an international government. It is a defining feature of IR. Debates over its implications are at the heart of IR theory.

Balancing: A self-help strategy of counterposing power against power, either internally (by reallocating resources to security) or externally (through alliances).

Great power: A state with the ability to inflict unacceptable damage on any other state in the system.

Polarity: The number of poles of power (great powers) in a system. Systems with one, two, three, a few and many/no great powers  – unipolar, bipolar, tripolar, multipolar and unpolarized systems – have different structural dynamics.

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Realism (Realpolitik, power politics): An orientation towards IR that emphasizes conflict and the pursuit of power that arises when equal and self-interested actors interact in the absence of a government to make and enforce rules and agreements.

Self-help: Because of international anarchy, international systems are self-help systems. With no government to appeal to, each actor must provide for its own security.

State of nature: An imagined pre-social condition that is often presented as an analogy for thinking about the relations of states in IR.

Further Reading Gilpin, R. (1984). ‘The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism’, International Organization 38(2):287–304. Jervis, R. (1998) ‘Realism in the Study of World Politics’, International Organization 52(4):971–991. Mearsheimer, J.J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W.Norton). Waltz, K.N. (1990) ‘Realist Thought and Neo-Realist Theory’, Journal of International Affairs 44(1):21–37. Wendt, A. (1992) ‘Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics’, International Organization 46(2):391–425. Wohlforth, W.C. (2008) ‘Realism’, in C.  Reus-Smit and D.  Snidal (eds.), Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

LIBERALISM

SCOTT BURCHILL

3

Liberalism has made significant and ongoing contributions to the study of International Relations in three broad areas. The first focuses on the causes of international wars. By promoting a liberaldemocratic peace between states combined with a preference for free trade in their commercial exchanges, liberalism provides a theoretical pathway to a world without war. No other approach is as ambitious or optimistic as to view war as an unnatural stain on the human condition that can ultimately be eliminated. Secondly, by emphasizing the importance of individual freedom, liberals have been the prime authors and promotors of contemporary human rights in the modern world. They have long regarded the arbitrary power of the state as the greatest threat to individual freedom, and consider human rights to be inherent, inalienable and universal. Thirdly, as the champions of economic globalization, liberals have long stressed the importance of market-based economic relations, particularly in foreign investment and free trade. Consistent with their preference for a minimal state, this is not just an argument for economic efficiency. It is also the conviction that commercial barriers between individuals, erected by states, inhibit the development of a single human family and the ultimate dissolution of exclusive political communities. Liberalism is the most enduring philosophical tradition to have emerged from the European Enlightenment. It is an approach to politics that champions scientific rationality, freedom and the inevitability of human progress. It is a perspective of government that emphasizes individual rights, constitutionalism, democracy and limitations on the powers of the state. It also promotes a model of economic organization that argues that market capitalism improves the welfare of all by most efficiently allocating scarce resources within society. Despite its ancient lineage, liberalism’s influence today can be measured by its authorship of two trends in contemporary international politics – the spread of democracy after the Cold War and the globalization of the world economy. There are many strands of liberal thought that influence the study of international relations. The chapter begins by analysing the revival of liberal thought after the Cold War. It then explains how liberal attitudes to war, the spread of democracy and human rights continue to inform political thinking and government behaviour. The influence of economic liberalism, in particular interdependency theory and liberal institutionalism, is assessed before liberal arguments for globalization and the impact of non-state terrorism on liberal thought are measured. The conclusion assesses the contribution of liberalism to the theory of international relations.

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After the Cold War The demise of Soviet Communism in the 1990s enhanced the influence of liberal theories of international relations within the academy, a theoretical tradition widely thought to have been discredited by perspectives such as realism, which emphasize the recurrent features of international relations. In a reassertion of the teleology of liberalism, Fukuyama claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union proved that liberal democracy had no serious ideological competitor: it was ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1992: xi–xii). It was an argument initially strengthened by transitions to democracy in East Asia, East Europe, Latin America and later, temporarily, in North Africa and the Middle East. It was also buttressed by the apparent triumph of a rules-based liberal world order (Dunne and Flockhart 2013). For Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War saw the triumph of the ‘ideal state’ and a particular mode of political economy, ‘liberal capitalism’, which ‘cannot be improved upon’: there can be ‘no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions’ (Fukuyama 1992: xi–xii). The end of the East–West conflict confirmed that liberal capitalism was unchallenged as a model of, and endpoint for, humankind’s political and economic development. There ‘is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies – in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy’ (Fukuyama 1992: xi–xii, 48). Fukuyama’s belief that Western forms of government and political economy are the ultimate destination for the entire species posed a number of challenges for the study of international relations. First, his claim that political and economic development terminates at liberal-capitalist democracy assumed that the Western path to modernity will not face a future rival, and will eventually command global consent. Secondly, Fukuyama’s argument assumed that national, religious and cultural distinctions are no barrier to the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. Thirdly, his thesis raised vital, unanswered questions about governance and political community. For example, what are the implications of globalization for nation-states and their sovereign powers? What about societies that explicitly reject market capitalism and parliamentary democracy? Key Concept: Liberal Democracy There are many different definitions of liberal democracy, but most would include the idea of representative government where only popular consent can confer legitimacy on government through free and fair elections. It also includes a free media that can criticize government, civil rights (including freedoms of speech, religion and assembly), human

rights protections guaranteed by laws, the sanctity of the rule of law and the legitimacy of political opposition. In international relations, liberal democracies reciprocally recognize each other’s legitimacy and impose constraints, usually in the form of checks and balances and the diffusion of power, upon executive authority.

The post-Cold War optimism of liberals was tempered by a series of unexpected events that suggest the path to modernity remained a rocky one. The rise of Islamist terrorism, democratic reversals in states such as Thailand and Fiji, the collapse of the Arab Spring, the rise of China and resistance to the coercive spread of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest Fukuyama’s

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celebration of the end of history was premature. Endemic financial crises, which have plagued the global economy continuously since 2007, have similarly shaken the confidence of liberals who believed capitalism was a stable, enduring economic structure. Liberals believe that progress in human history can be measured by the elimination of global conflict and the adoption of principles of legitimacy that have evolved in domestic political orders. This constitutes an inside-out approach to international relations, where the behaviour of states can be explained by their endogenous arrangements. It also leads to Doyle’s important claim that ‘liberal democracies are uniquely willing to eschew the use of force in their relations with one another’, a view that rejects the realist contention that the anarchical nature of the international system means states are trapped in a struggle for power and security (Linklater 1993: 29). Fukuyama’s reflections on the end of the Cold War are of no more than historical interest now, but their influence at the time was considerable. They encapsulated many of the core liberal ideas that have been influential in the United States and in various international organizations over the last three decades, including the belief in a liberal-democratic peace and in free market economies. Fukuyama is now less sanguine about the progressive inevitability of liberalism, and he laments the absence of new liberal leaders emerging from the Arab Spring and other more recent political transitions. He remains an organic liberal to the extent that he believes liberal-democratic orders must be endogenous if they are to succeed (they cannot be exported by violence), but is discouraged by the failure of liberals in the post-Cold War period to organize themselves into viable political parties (Fukuyama 2012). The claim that for seventy years Washington led and maintained a liberal rules-based world order has long been challenged by scholars on the left such as Chomsky and Kolko, who argued that it was little more than US national and commercial interests masquerading as altruism. These so-called rules produced more violence, interventions and instability than peace and order, just as they had done when liberalism was invoked to justify imperialism and colonialism (Bell 2016). Increasingly, this is also now the view of realists who argue that the abuse of American power in the name of liberalism has left a less predictable and more dangerous world in its wake (Sorensen 2011; Mearsheimer 2018; Walt 2018; Porter 2020).

The Liberal View: ‘Inside Looking Out’ In the 1990s, Fukuyama revived a long-held view among liberals that the spread of legitimate domestic political orders would eventually bring an end to international conflict. This neo-Kantian position assumed that particular states, with liberal-democratic polities, constituted an ideal that the rest of the world will emulate. Fukuyama was struck by the extent to which liberal democracies had transcended their violent instincts and institutionalized norms that pacify relations between them. He was particularly impressed by the emergence of shared principles of legitimacy among the great powers. The projection of liberal-democratic principles to the international realm provides the best prospect for a peaceful world order because ‘a world made up of liberal democracies … should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another’s legitimacy’ (Fukuyama 1992: xx). This approach is rejected by neo-realists, who claim that the moral aspirations of states are thwarted by the absence of an overarching authority that regulates their behaviour towards each

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other. The anarchical nature of the international system tends to homogenize foreign policy behaviour by socializing states into the system of power politics. Requirements for strategic power and security are paramount in an insecure world, and override the ethical pursuits of states regardless of their domestic political complexions. In stressing the importance of legitimate domestic orders in explaining foreign policy behaviour, realists such as Waltz believe that liberals are guilty of ‘reductionism’ when they should be highlighting the ‘systemic’ features of international relations. The differences between ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ approaches to international relations is an important line of demarcation in modern international theory (Waltz 1991: 667). The extent to which the neo-realist critique of liberal internationalism can be sustained is a major consideration of this chapter. Fukuyama’s argument was more than a celebration of the fact that liberal capitalism had survived the threat posed by Marxism. It also implied that neo-realism had overlooked ‘the foremost macropolitical trend in contemporary world politics: the expansion of the liberal zone of peace’ (Linklater 1993: 29). Challenging the view that anarchy conditions international behaviour is Doyle’s argument that there is a growing core of pacific states that have learned to resolve their differences without resorting to violence. The expansion of this pacific realm is a significant feature of the contemporary world. If this claim can be upheld, it would constitute a significant comeback for an international theory widely thought to have been terminally damaged by Carr in his critique of liberal utopianism in the late 1930s. It also poses a serious challenge to theoretical assumptions that war is an endemic feature of international life (Doyle 1986: 1151–1569).

War, Democracy and Free Trade The foundations of contemporary liberal internationalism were laid in the 18th and 19th centuries by liberals proposing preconditions for a peaceful world order. In broad summary, they concluded that the prospects for the elimination of war lay with a preference for democracy over aristocracy and free trade over autarky. This section examines these arguments in turn, and the extent to which they inform contemporary liberal thought. Key Concept: Liberal Internationalism The definition of liberal internationalism has changed from its earlier iteration as an informal coalition of states with similar outlooks on politics and economy, including a commitment to self-­ determination, parliamentary democracy, free trade, economic interdependence and international institutions and law that enshrine these principles. More recently, liberal internationalism

is seen as an approach to foreign policy that argues that liberal states can and should intervene in the sovereign affairs of others in order to pursue liberal political and economic objectives. Such intervention can include military invasion for humanitarian purposes (e.g. the right to protect) and the provision of aid in times of humanitarian emergencies such as natural disasters.

Prospects for Peace For liberals, peace is the normal state of affairs: in Kant’s words, peace can be perpetual. The laws of nature dictated harmony and cooperation between peoples. War is therefore both unnatural and

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irrational, an artificial contrivance and not a product of some peculiarity of human nature. Liberals believe in progress and the perfectibility of the human condition. With faith in the power of reason and the capacity of human beings to realize their inner potential, they remain confident that the stain of war can be removed from human experience (Gardner 1990: 23–39; Hoffmann 1995: 159–177; Zacher and Matthew 1995: 107–150). A common thread, from Rousseau, Kant and Cobden to Schumpeter and Doyle, is that wars were created by militaristic and undemocratic governments for their own vested interests. They were engineered by a ‘warrior class’ bent on extending their power and wealth through territorial conquest. According to Paine in The Rights of Man (1791), the ‘war system’ was contrived to preserve the power and the employment of princes, statesmen, soldiers, diplomats and armaments manufacturers, and to bind their tyranny ever more firmly upon the necks of the people’ (Howard 1978: 31). Wars provide governments with excuses to raise taxes, expand their bureaucratic apparatus and increase control over their citizens. The people, on the other hand, were peace-loving by nature, and only plunged into conflict by the whims of their unrepresentative rulers. War was a cancer on the body politic. But it was an ailment that human beings had the capacity to cure. The treatment that liberals began prescribing in the 18th century has not changed: the ‘disease’ of war could be successfully treated with the twin medicines of democracy and free trade. Democratic processes and institutions would break the power of the ruling elites and curb their propensity for violence. Free trade and commerce would overcome the artificial barriers between individuals and unite them everywhere into one community. For liberals such as Schumpeter, war was the product of the aggressive instincts of unrepresentative elites. The warlike disposition of these rulers drove the reluctant masses into violent conflicts that, while profitable for the arms industries and the military aristocrats, were disastrous for those who did the fighting. For Kant, the establishment of republican forms of government in which rulers were accountable and individual rights were respected would lead to peaceful international relations because the ultimate consent for war would rest with the citizens of the state (Kant 1970: 100). For both Kant and Schumpeter, war was the outcome of minority rule, though Kant was no champion of democratic government (MacMillan 1995). Liberal states, founded on individual rights such as equality before the law, free speech and civil liberty, respect for private property and representative government, would not have the same appetite for conflict and war. Peace was fundamentally a question of establishing legitimate domestic orders throughout the world: ‘When the citizens who bear the burdens of war elect their governments, wars become impossible’ (Doyle 1986: 1151). The dual themes of domestic legitimacy and the extent to which liberal-democratic states exercise restraint and peaceful intentions in their foreign policy have been taken up by Doyle, Russett and others. In a restatement of Kant’s argument that a ‘pacific federation’ can be built by expanding the number of states with republican constitutions, Doyle claims that liberal democracies are unique in their ability to establish peaceful relations among themselves. This pacification of foreign relations between liberal states is said to be a direct product of their shared legitimate political orders based on democratic principles and institutions. The reciprocal recognition of these common principles – a commitment to the rule of law, individual rights and equality before the law, and representative government based on popular consent – means that liberal democracies evince little interest in conflict with each other and have no grounds on which to contest each other’s legitimacy: they have constructed a ‘separate peace’ (Doyle 1986: 1161; Fukuyama 1992: xx).

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This does not mean that they are less inclined to make war with non-democratic states, and Doyle is correct to point out that democracies maintain a healthy appetite for conflicts with authoritarian states, as conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia attest. But it does suggest that the best prospect for bringing an end to war between states lies with the spread of liberal-democratic governments across the globe. The expansion of the zone of peace from the core to the periphery was also the basis of Fukuyama’s optimism about the post-Communist era (Doyle 1986, 1995, 1997; Russett 1993). There are both structural and normative aspects to what has been termed ‘democratic peace theory’. Some liberals emphasize the institutional constraints on liberal-democratic states, such as public opinion, the rule of law and representative government. The checks and balances provided by elections, divisions of power and other legal-political restrictions make wars more difficult for liberal states to contrive. Others stress the normative preference for compromise and conflict resolution that can be found in the political processes of liberal democracies. A combination of both explanations strengthens the argument that liberal-democratic states do not resolve their differences violently, although realist critics point to definitional problems with the idea of liberal democracy and the question of covert action, and ask why the constraints on war-making do not apply in relations with authoritarian states. Realists argue that at best democratic peace theory identifies a correlation in international politics rather than an ‘iron law’ or theory (Maoz and Russett 1993; Owen 1994). The argument is extended by Rawls, who claims that liberal societies are also ‘less likely to engage in war with non-liberal outlaw states, except on grounds of legitimate self-defence (or in the defence of their legitimate allies), or intervention in severe cases to protect human rights’ (Rawls 1999: 49). US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya pose significant challenges to the claim that only self-defence and humanitarianism incline liberal-democratic states to war. Box 3.1 The US Invasion of Iraq Liberals are split between those who believe democracy will develop when the circumstances are propitious in each country, and those who think democracy can be successfully exported  – usually by military power. What might be called ‘organic’ liberals believe liberal democracy is the ultimate political destination for all, but that the specific timing of its arrival will vary from state to state depending on specific domestic circumstances such as the emergence of a charismatic leader. ‘Interventionist’ liberals (who share their approach with neo-conservatives) believe historical developments in laggard states can be accel-

erated using coercive means such as military intervention. When other rationales and pretexts collapsed, the United States argued that its invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified on the grounds that democracy had to be spread by force to transform that state’s political arrangements and encourage the spread of democracy in the wider Middle East. It was claimed (falsely) that Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to Western democracies and, therefore, there was no time for an organic transition to democracy to occur.

Popular revolts in North Africa and the Persian Gulf, collectively known as the Arab Spring, were without exception endogenous uprisings and not enthusiastically welcomed by outsiders in the West who normally espouse the virtues of liberal democracy, despite their anti-authoritarian flavour. In at least one case, Egypt, the United States under Obama worked hard to reverse the removal of the Mubarak regime and install the el-Sisi military dictatorship, the exact opposite of

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democracy promotion. Favouring military and Islamist governments over secular democracies has a long history in US foreign policy (Burchill 2020: 107–132). A related argument by Mueller (1989) claims that we are already witnessing the obsolescence of war between the major powers. Reviving the liberal faith in the capacity of people to improve the moral and material conditions of their lives, Mueller argued that, just as duelling and slavery were eventually seen as morally unacceptable, war will also be viewed in the developed world as repulsive, immoral and uncivilized. That violence is more widely seen as an anachronistic form of social intercourse is not due to any change in human nature or the structure of the international system. According to Mueller, the obsolescence of major war in the late 20th century was the product of moral learning, a shift in ethical consciousness away from coercive forms of social behaviour. Because wars bring more costs than gains and are no longer seen as a romantic or noble pursuit, they have become ‘rationally unthinkable’ (Mueller 1989). The long peace between states of the industrialized world is a cause of profound optimism for liberals, who are confident that we have already entered a period in which war as an instrument of international diplomacy is becoming obsolete. But if war has been an important factor in nation-­ building, as Giddens (1985), Mann (1986) and Tilly (1992) have argued, the fact that states are learning to curb their propensity for violence will also have important consequences for forms of political community that are likely to emerge in the industrial centres of the world. The end of war between the great powers may have the effect of weakening the rigidity of their political boundaries and inspiring a wave of sub-national revolts, although the post-9/11 wave of anti-Western terror complicated matters in this regard by encouraging states to solidify their boundaries and make greater demands on the loyalty of citizens. Far from sharing the post-Cold War optimism of liberals, realists such as Waltz and Mearsheimer argued that the collapse of bipolarity in the early 1990s was a cause for grave concern. Mutual nuclear deterrence maintained a stabilizing balance of power in the world, whereas unipolarity would not last, eventually leading to volatility and war. As Waltz argued, ‘in international politics, unbalanced power constitutes a danger even when it is American power that is out of balance’ (Waltz 1991: 670). Accordingly, the expansion of a zone of peace is no antidote to the calculations of raw power in an anarchical world. Conflicts in the Balkans, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf  – all involving major industrial powers – are a reminder that the post-Cold War period remains volatile and suggest that war has not lost its efficacy in international diplomacy. None of these were conflicts between democratic states, but they are no less important to the maintenance of world order. These and other struggles in so-called ‘failed states’ such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia are a reminder that the fragmentation of nation-states and civil wars arising from secessionist movements have not been given the same attention by liberals as more conventional inter-state wars. Democratic peace theory provides few guidelines for how liberal states should conduct themselves with non-liberal states. Rawls, however, is concerned with the extent to which liberal and non-liberal peoples can be equal participants in a ‘Society of Peoples’. He argues that principles and norms of international law and practice – the ‘Law of Peoples’ – can be developed and shared by both liberal and non-liberal or decent hierarchical societies, without an expectation that liberal democracy is the terminus for all. Guidelines for establishing harmonious relations between liberal and non-liberal peoples under a common Law of Peoples takes liberal international theory in a

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more sophisticated direction, because it explicitly acknowledges the need for utopian thought to be realistic (Rawls 1999: 11–23). As the number of East Asian and Islamic societies that reject the normative superiority of liberal democracy consolidates, doubt has been cast on the belief that the non-European world is seeking to imitate the Western route to political modernization. This has also been illustrated by the wave of anti-Western Islamist terror since 2001. Linklater suggests that it is not so much the spread of liberal democracy per se that has universal appeal, ‘but the idea of limited power which is present within, but not entirely synonymous with, liberal democracy’ (Linklater 1993: 33–36; Rawls 1999). The notion of limited power and respect for the rule of law contained within the idea of ‘constitutionalism’ may be one means of solving the exclusionary character of the liberal zone of peace. It is a less ambitious project and potentially more sensitive to the cultural and political differences among states in the current international system. It may avoid the danger of the system bifurcating into a privileged inner circle and a disadvantaged, disaffected outer circle (Linklater 1993: 33). The greatest barrier to the expansion of the zone of peace from the core is the perception within the periphery that this constitutes little more than the domination of one culture by another.

The Spirit of Commerce Liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries felt that the spirits of war and commerce were mutually incompatible. Wars were often fought by states to achieve their mercantilist goals. According to Carr, ‘the aim of mercantilism … was not to promote the welfare of the community and its members, but to augment the power of the state, of which the sovereign was the embodiment ... wealth was the source of power, or more specifically of fitness for war’. Until the Napoleonic wars, ‘wealth, conceived in its simplest form as bullion, was brought in by exports; and since, in the static conception of society prevailing at this period, export markets were a fixed quantity not susceptible of increase as a whole, the only way for a nation to expand its markets and therefore its wealth was to capture them from some other nation, if necessary by waging a trade war’ (Carr 1945: 5–6). Free trade, however, was a more peaceful means of achieving national wealth because, according to the theory of comparative advantage, each economy would be materially better off than if it had been pursuing nationalism and self-sufficiency. Free trade would also break down the divisions between states and unite individuals everywhere in one community. Artificial barriers to commerce distorted relations between individuals, thereby causing international tension. Free trade would expand the levels of understanding between the peoples of the world and encourage international friendship and understanding. According to Kant, unhindered commerce between the peoples of the world would unite them in a common, peaceful enterprise. ‘Trade … would increase the wealth and power of the peace-loving, productive sections of the population at the expense of the war-­ orientated aristocracy, and … would bring men of different nations into constant contact with one another; contact which would make clear to all of them their fundamental community of interests’ (Howard 1978: 20; Walter 1996). Similarly, Ricardo believed that free trade ‘binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilised world’ (Ricardo 1911: 114). Conflicts were often caused by states erecting barriers that distorted the natural harmony of interests commonly shared by individuals across the world. The solution to the problem, argued Smith and Paine, was the free movement of commodities, capital and labour. ‘If commerce were

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permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war and produce a revolution in the uncivilised state of governments’ (Howard 1978: 29). Writing in 1848, Mill also claimed that free trade was the means to bring about the end of war: ‘it is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which act in natural opposition to it’ (Howard 1978: 37). The spread of markets would place societies on an entirely new foundation. Instead of conflicts over limited resources such as land, the Industrial Revolution raised the prospect of unlimited prosperity for all: material production, so long as it was freely exchanged, would bring human progress. Trade would create relations of mutual dependence that would foster understanding between peoples and reduce conflict. Economic self-interest would then be a powerful disincentive for war. Liberals believe unfettered commercial exchanges encourage links across frontiers and shift loyalties away from the nation-state. Leaders would eventually come to recognize that the benefits of free trade outweigh the costs of territorial conquest and colonial expansion. The attraction of going to war to promote mercantilist interests would be weakened as societies realized that war can only disrupt trade and therefore the prospects for economic prosperity. Interdependence would replace national competition and defuse unilateral acts of aggression and reciprocal retaliation.

Interdependence and Liberal Institutionalism Free trade is at the heart of modern interdependency theory. The rise of regional economic integration in Europe, for example, was inspired by the belief that conflict between states could be reduced by creating a common interest in trade and economic collaboration among members of the same geographical region. This would encourage states such as France and Germany, which often resolved their differences militarily, to cooperate within a commonly agreed economic and political framework. States would have a joint stake in each other’s peace and prosperity. The European Union is a good example of economic integration engendering closer economic and political cooperation in a region historically bedevilled by national conflicts. As Mitrany argued, initial cooperation between states would be achieved in technical areas where it was mutually convenient, but once successful it could ‘spill over’ into other functional areas where states found that mutual advantages could be gained (Mitrany 1948: 350–363). In a development of this argument, Keohane and Nye explained how, via membership of international institutions, states can significantly broaden their conceptions of self-interest in order to widen the scope for cooperation. Compliance with the rules of these organizations not only discourages the narrow pursuit of national interests, but it also weakens the meaning and appeal of state sovereignty (Keohane and Nye 1977). This suggests that the international system is more normatively regulated than realists believe, a position further developed by English School theorists such as Wight and Bull, as discussed in Chapter 5. A development of this argument can be found in liberal institutionalism, which shares with neo-­ realism an acceptance of the importance of the state and the anarchical condition of the international system, though liberal institutionalists argue that the prospects for cooperation, even in an anarchical world, are greater than neo-realists allow (Young 1982; Nye 1988; Powell 1994). Liberal institutionalists claim that cooperation between states can be organized in institutions. ‘Institutions’ in this sense means sets of rules that govern state behaviour in specific policy areas, such as the Law of the Sea.

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Accepting the broad structures of neo-realism, but employing rational choice and game theory to anticipate the behaviour of states, liberal institutionalists demonstrate that cooperation between states can be enhanced even without the presence of a hegemonic player which can enforce compliance with agreements. For them, anarchy is mitigated by regimes and institutional cooperation, which brings higher levels of predictability to international relations. Regimes – sets of principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures – constrain state behaviour by formalizing the expectations of each party to an agreement where there is, for example, a pandemic, drug trafficking or organized crime. They reflect the inability of individual states to solve global issues without broader cooperation. They enhance trust, continuity and stability in a world of otherwise ungoverned anarchy. Neo-realists and neo-liberals disagree about how states conceive of their own interests. Whereas neo-realists such as Waltz argue that states are concerned with ‘relative gains’  – meaning gains assessed in comparative terms (who will gain more?), neo-liberals claim that states are concerned with maximizing their ‘absolute gains’ – an assessment of their own welfare independent of their shared interests (what will gain me the most?). Institutions then assume the role of encouraging cooperative habits, monitoring compliance, enforcement where possible and sanctioning cheaters and defectors. Today, regimes are said to exist in a growing range of policy areas, including environmental regulation (e.g. climate change), global finance and trade (through the G20), public health (the World Health Organization) and counter-terrorism. Neo-realists argue that states will baulk at cooperation if they expect to gain less than their rivals. Liberal institutionalists, on the other hand, believe international relations need not be a zero-sum game, as many states feel secure enough to maximize their own gains regardless of what accrues to others. Mutual benefits arising out of cooperation are possible because states are not always preoccupied with relative gains – hence the opportunities for constructing regimes around issues of common concern. Liberal institutionalists acknowledge that cooperation between states is likely to be tenuous and limited, particularly where enforcement procedures are weak and cheating brings advantages. However, in an environment of growing regional and global integration, states can often discover – with or without the encouragement of a hegemon – a coincidence of strategic and economic interests that can be turned into a formalized agreement determining the rules of conduct. In areas such as environmental degradation, financial crises and the threat of terrorism, the argument for formal cooperation between states is compelling. Keohane has acknowledged the strain on liberal institutionalism from new centres of political and economic power in the world, as well as the continuing relevance of the realist critique. Nonetheless he maintains that institutions offer a source of hope for those liberals who remain committed to progress in international politics while being concerned by the dangers of unchecked power (Keohane 2012). According to Rosecrance (1986), the growth of economic interdependency has been matched by a corresponding decline in the value of territorial conquest for states. In the contemporary world, the benefits of trade and cooperation among states exceed those of military competition and territorial control. In their mercantilist phase, nation-states regarded the acquisition of territory as the principal means of increasing national wealth. It has become apparent that additional territory does not necessarily help states to compete in an international system where the ‘trading state’ rather than the ‘military state’ is becoming dominant. In the 1970s, state elites began to

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realize that wealth is determined by their share of the world market in value-added goods and services. This understanding had two significant effects. First, the age of the independent, self-­ sufficient state is over. Complex layers of economic interdependency ensure that states cannot act aggressively without risking economic penalties imposed by other members of the international community, a fate even for great powers such as the United States and China today. It also makes little sense for a state to threaten its commercial partners, whose markets and capital investment are essential for its own economic growth. These are unavoidable dilemmas for faux nationalists. Secondly, territorial conquest in the nuclear age is both dangerous and costly for rogue states. The alternative  – economic development through trade and foreign investment  – is a much more attractive and potentially beneficial strategy (Rosecrance 1986; Strange 1991). Neo-realists have two responses to the liberal claim that economic interdependency is pacifying international relations (Grieco 1988). First, they argue that in any struggle between competing disciplines, the anarchic environment and the insecurity it engenders will always take priority over the quest for economic prosperity. Economic interdependency will never take precedence over strategic security because states must be primarily concerned with their precarious survival. Their capacity to explore avenues of economic cooperation will be limited by how secure they feel and the extent to which they are required to engage in military competition with others. Secondly, the idea of economic interdependence implies a misleading degree of equality and shared vulnerability to economic forces in the global economy. Interdependence does not eliminate hegemony and dependency in inter-state relations because power is unevenly distributed throughout the world’s trade and financial markets. Dominant players such as the United States have usually framed the rules under which interdependency has flourished. Conflict and cooperation is therefore unlikely to disappear, though it may be channelled into more peaceful forms.

Human Rights The advocacy of democracy and free trade foreshadows another idea that liberalism introduced to international theory. Liberals believe the legitimacy of domestic political orders is contingent upon upholding the rule of law and the state’s respect for the human rights of its citizens. If it is wrong for an individual to engage in socially unacceptable or criminal behaviour, it is also wrong for states. References to essential human needs are implicit in some of the earliest written legal codes from ancient Babylon, as well as early Buddhist, Confucian and Hindu texts, though the first explicit mention of universal principles governing common standards of human behaviour can be found in the Western canon. The idea of universal human rights has its origins in the Natural Law tradition, debates in the West during the Enlightenment over the ‘rights of man’ and in the experience of individuals struggling against the arbitrary rule of the state (Donnelly 2003). The Magna Carta in 1215, the development of English Common Law and the Bill of Rights in 1689 were significant, if evolutionary, steps along the path to enshrining basic human rights in law, as were intellectual contributions from Grotius (the law of nations), Rousseau (the social contract) and Locke (popular consent, limits of sovereignty). An early legal articulation of human rights can be found in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 (‘we take these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’) and in France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789 (‘all men are born free and equal in their rights’).

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The development of human rights occurred as cultural and legal practices in the Western world changed. These included the expansion of moral communities as empathy for human suffering spread beyond the confines of particularist locales, the rejection of torture as an instrument for establishing the truth in legal processes, and the redefinition of human relationships, including greater respect for the autonomy of the body, found in literature and art from the late 18th century (Hunt 2007). Human beings are said to be endowed – purely by reason of their humanity – with certain fundamental rights, benefits and protections. These rights are regarded as inherent in the sense they are the birthright of all, inalienable because they cannot be given up or taken away and universal since they apply to all regardless of nationality, status, gender or race. Liberals have a normative commitment to human rights, believing certain values and standards should be applied universally. The extension of these rights to all peoples has a particularly important place in liberal thinking about foreign policy and international relations for two reasons. First, these rights provide a legal foundation for emancipation, justice and human freedom. Their denial by state authorities is an affront to the dignity of all and a stain on the human condition. Secondly, states that treat their own citizens ethically and allow them meaningful participation in the political process are thought to be less likely to behave aggressively internationally. The task for liberals has been to develop moral standards that would command universal consent, knowing that in doing so states may be required to limit the pursuit of their own national interests. This has proved to be a difficult task, despite evident progress on labour rights, the abolition of slavery, the political emancipation of women in the West, the treatment of indigenous peoples and the end of white supremacy in South Africa (Dunne and Wheeler 1999; Donnelly 2003). The creation of important legal codes, instruments and institutions in the post-Second World War period is a measure of achievement in the area. The most important instruments are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), while the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) play a significant institutional and symbolic role in the protection of human rights. A greater concern about genocidal crimes, the outlawing of cruel and inhuman punishment and the rights of detainees apprehended on the battlefield are a reflection of ongoing progress in the area. In his seminal account, Vincent (1986) identified the right of the individual to be free from starvation as the only human right that is likely to become a global consensus. The world community, regardless of religious or ideological differences, agrees that a right to subsistence was essential to the dignity of humankind. Beyond this right, states struggle to find agreement, not least because the developing world is suspicious that human rights advocacy from metropolitan centres is little more than a pretext for unwarranted interference in their domestic affairs. Most states are reluctant to give outsiders the power to compel them to improve their ethical performance, although there is a growing belief that the principle of territorial sovereignty should no longer be used by governments as a credible excuse for avoiding legitimate international scrutiny – hence growing support for international humanitarian intervention (Wheeler 2000). Marxists have dismissed liberal human rights as mere bourgeois freedoms that fail to address the class-based nature of exploitation contained within capitalist relations of production. Realists would add that ‘conditions of profound insecurity for states do not permit ethical and humane

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considerations to override their primary national considerations’ (Linklater 1992b: 27). It is interests which determine political action and in the global arena, politics is the amoral struggle for power to advance them. Other critics claim that the implementation of these rights, for example the abolition of child labour on the subcontinent, would consign millions to greater levels of poverty. Liberals struggle to avoid the charge that their conceptions of democracy and human rights are culturally specific, ethnocentric and therefore irrelevant to societies that are not Western in cultural orientation. To many societies, appeals to universality merely conceal the means by which one dominant society imposes its culture upon another, infringing on its sovereign independence. The promotion of human rights from the core to the periphery assumes a degree of moral superiority – that the West not only possesses moral truths that others are bound to observe, but that it can sit in judgement on those societies. The issue is further complicated by the argument that economic, social and cultural rights should precede civil and political rights – one made earlier by communist states and more recently by a number of East Asian governments. Sometimes this is characterized as a struggle between first- and second-generation rights. This claim is a direct challenge to the idea that human rights are indivisible and universal, and may be part of what Bull called a revolt against the West. It implies that the alleviation of poverty and economic development in societies depends on the initial denial of political freedoms and human rights to the citizen. However, the claim that rights can be prioritized in this way – that procedural and substantive freedoms are sometimes incompatible – is problematic and widely seen, with justification, as a rationalization by governments for authoritarian rule. An increasing number of conservative political leaders in East Asia have also argued that there is a superior Asian model of political and social organization comprising the principles of harmony, hierarchy and consensus (Confucianism) in contrast to what they regard as the confrontation, individualism and moral decay that characterizes Western liberalism. Regardless of how self-serving this argument is – and it is rarely offered by democratically elected rulers – it poses a fundamental challenge to Fukuyama’s suggestion that in the post-Cold War period liberal democracy faced no serious universal challenges. It is clear that a number of states, including Islamic societies, are not striving to imitate the Western route to political modernization. Some reject it outright. More recent years have also seen considerable slippage in the Western world’s commitment to universal human rights. The ‘war on terror’ led by the United States provided a more permissive attitude to the use of torture, the incarceration without trial of enemy combatants and the rendition of enemy suspects to third-party countries for more coercive interrogation than would be permitted in the West. The exposure of these practices weakened any moral force the West may have invoked for the universal spread of human rights. Even if universal rules and instruments could be agreed upon, how could compliance with universal standards be enforced? Liberals are divided over this issue, between non-interventionists who defend state sovereignty and those who feel that the promotion of ethical principles can justify intervention in the internal affairs of other states (see Bull 1984; Wheeler 2000). Examples of so-called humanitarian intervention in Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia, Somalia, East Timor and Libya pose a growing challenge to the protection from outside interference traditionally afforded by sovereignty claims. This also applies to the prosecution of those suspected of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity (Forbes and Hoffman 1993). The ICC, established

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in 2002, can be seen as a further expression of liberal sentiments that oppose the arbitrary cruelty of political leaders and the use of agencies of the state to inflict harm on minorities and opponents. However, its very structure and functions limit the sovereign right of a government to administer the internal affairs of their state free from outside interference. States such as the United States and Russia, which refuse to ratify the ICC for reasons of sovereignty, are likely to come under increasing pressure in the years ahead to conform with what appears to be a growing global consensus. Celebrated trials (Milosevic, Saddam, Mubarak) and attention given to non-trials (Pinochet, Suharto, Gaddafi, Israeli leaders) indicate a significant shift away from the traditional provision of sovereign immunity to heads of state and others guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Whereas in the past, justice, if dispensed at all, would come from within the state, the establishment of international legal fora and the further development of international law in this area largely stem from the influence of liberal internationalism and its emphasis on the importance of global benchmarks and the rule of law. It is true that cases such as these never truly escape the political atmosphere of the day, in particular the domestic political climate in each country directly involved, but the fact that they arise at all within international legal jurisdictions indicates progress towards a global jurisdiction. Modern forms of humanitarian intervention follow a pattern established in the middle of the 18th century, when the British and Dutch successfully interceded on behalf of Prague’s Jewish community, which was threatened with deportation by authorities in Bohemia. The protection of Christian minorities at risk in Europe and in the Orient in the 18th and 19th centuries by the Treaty of Kucuk-Kainardji (1774) and the Treaty of Berlin (1878) are also part of the same legal precedent, as is the advocacy of British Prime Minister Gladstone in the second half of the 19th century and US President Wilson early in the 20th century. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978, when refracted through the ideological prism of the Cold War, highlighted the politically contingent nature of humanitarian intervention in the modern period. This explains why the articulation of a ‘right to protect’ still awaits political support across the globe. Liberals who support both the sovereign rights of independent states and the right of external intervention in cases where there is an acute humanitarian crisis find it difficult to reconcile both international norms (Chomsky 1999).

Globalization, the Financial System and Terrorism Economic liberalism has become the dominant ideology of the contemporary period. The move towards a global political economy organized along neo-liberal lines is a trend as significant as the likely expansion of the zone of peace. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the world economy has more closely resembled the prescriptions of Smith and Ricardo than at any previous time. As MacPherson forecast, this development is also a measure of ‘how deeply the market assumptions about the nature of man and society have penetrated liberal-democratic theory’ (MacPherson 1977: 21). Two dark clouds that appeared on the horizon, however, were as serious as they were unexpected. A wave of anti-Western Islamist terror beginning in 2001 became a significant blockage on the path to globalization and confronts liberals with a range of intellectual dilemmas and policy reversals for which they were unprepared. And the global financial crisis that broke in 2007 shook the confidence of those espousing the virtues of market forces in the sector.

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Before examining the extent to which liberalism has shaped the contours of the world economy today and the impacts of economic crises and Islamist terror, it is important to recognize that the experience of laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century challenged many liberal assumptions about human beings, the market and the role of the state. Scholars such as Polanyi highlighted the extent to which material self-gain in a market society was necessary for survival in an unregulated market economy, rather than a reflection of the human condition in its natural state. It is unwise for liberals to generalize from the specific case of market capitalism – to believe that behaviour enforced as a result of a new and presumably transient form of political economy was a true reflection of a human being’s inner self (Polanyi 1944; Block and Somers 1984). State intervention in the economic life of a society was in fact an act of community self-defence against the destructive power of unfettered markets, which, according to Polanyi, if left unregulated, threatened to annihilate society. However, state intervention in the economy was also necessary for markets to function: free trade, commercial exchanges and liberal markets have always been policies of the state and have not emerged organically or independently of it. As List (1904) and many since have explained, the state plays a crucial role in the economic development of industrial societies, protecting embryonic industries from external competition until they are ready to win global market shares on an equal footing. There are few, if any, examples of states emerging as industrial powerhouses by initially adopting a policy of free trade. Protectionism and state-coordinated economic development were key ingredients of economic success in the modern world, as the post-war experience of East Asia suggests.

Liberalism and Globalization The globalization of the world economy coincided with a renaissance of neo-liberal thinking in the Western world. The political triumph of the ‘New Right’ in Britain and the United States in particular during the late 1970s and 1980s was achieved at the expense of Keynesianism, the first coherent philosophy of state intervention in economic life. According to the Keynesian formula, the state intervened in the economy to smooth out the business cycle, provide a degree of social equity and security and maintain full employment. Neo-liberals, who favoured the free play of ‘market forces’ and a minimal role for the state in economic life, wanted to ‘roll back’ the welfare state, in the process challenging the social-democratic consensus established in most Western states during the post-war period. Just as the ideological predilection of Western governments became more concerned with efficiency and productivity and less concerned with welfare and social justice, the power of the state to regulate the market was eroded by the forces of globalization, in particular the deregulation of finance and currency markets. The means by which domestic societies could be managed to reduce inequalities produced by inherited social structures and accentuated by the natural workings of the market declined significantly. In addition, the disappearance of many traditional industries in Western economies, the effects of technological change, increased competition for investment and production, and the mobility of capital undermined the bargaining power of labour. There is a considerable debate over globalization, between liberals who believe it constitutes a fundamentally new phase of capitalism and statists who are sceptical of such claims (Held et al. 1999; Held and McGrew 2000). Liberals point to the increasing irrelevance of national borders in the conduct and organization of economic activity. They focus on the growth of free trade, the

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capacity of transnational corporations (TNCs) to escape political regulation and national legal jurisdictions, and the liberation of capital from national and territorial constraints (Ohmae 1995; Friedman 2000; Micklewait and Wooldridge 2000). Sceptics, on the other hand, claim that the world was less open and globalized at the end of the 20th century than it was in the 19th. They suggest that the volume of world trade relative to the size of the world economy is much the same at the end of the 20th century as it was at the beginning, though they concede that the enormous explosion of short-term speculative capital transfers since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s has restricted the planning options for national governments. Significantly, sceptics want to distinguish between the idea of an international economy with growing links between separate national economies, which they concede, and a single global political economy without meaningful national borders or divisions, which they deny (Hirst and Thompson 1996; Weiss 1998; Chomsky 1999; Hobsbawm 2000).

The Nature of ‘Free Trade’ For neo-liberals, the principles of free trade first enunciated by Smith and Ricardo continue to have contemporary relevance. Commercial traders should be allowed to exchange money and goods without concern for national barriers. There should be few legal constraints on international commerce, and no artificial protection or subsidies constraining the freedom to exchange. An open global market, in which goods and services can pass freely across national boundaries, should be the objective of policymakers in all nation-states. Only free trade will maximize economic growth and generate the competition that will promote the most efficient use of resources, people and capital. Conversely, protectionism is seen as a pernicious influence on the body politic. Policies that protect uncompetitive industries from market principles corrupt international trade, distort market demand, artificially lower prices and encourage inefficiency, while penalizing fair traders. Protection is the cry of ‘special’ or ‘vested’ interests in society and should be resisted by government in ‘the national interest’. It penalizes developing nations by excluding them from entry into the global marketplace where they can exploit their domestic advantage in cheap labour. The cornerstone of the free trade argument is the theory of comparative advantage, which discourages national self-sufficiency by advising states to specialize in goods and services they can produce most cheaply – their ‘factor endowments’. They can then exchange their goods for what is produced more cheaply elsewhere. As everything is then produced most efficiently by the discipline of the price mechanism, the production of wealth is maximized and everyone is better off. For Smith, the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces directs every member of society in every state to the most advantageous position in the global economy. The self-interest of one becomes the general interest of all. The relevance of the theory of comparative advantage in the era of globalization has come under question (Strange 1985; Bairoch 1993; Daly and Cobb 1994; Clairmont 1996). The first difficulty is that it was devised at a time when there were national controls on capital movements. Ricardo and Smith assumed that capital was immobile and available only for national investment. They also assumed that the capitalist was first and foremost a member of a national political community, which was the context in which he established his commercial identity: Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ presupposed the internal bondings of community, so that the capitalist felt a ‘natural disinclination’ to invest abroad. Smith and Ricardo could not have foreseen ‘a world of cosmopolitan

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money managers and TNCs which, in addition to having limited liability and immorality conferred on them by national governments, have now transcended those very governments and no longer see the national community as their context’ (Daly and Cobb 1994: 215). The emergence of capitalists who freed themselves from community obligations and loyalties, and who had no ‘natural disinclination’ to invest abroad, would have appeared absurd. The second problem is that the forms of international trade have changed dramatically over recent decades. The idea of national, sovereign states trading with each other as discrete economic units is becoming an anachronism. Intra-industry or intra-firm trade dominates the manufacturing sector of the world economy. At least 50 per cent of all trade now comprises intra-firm transactions, which are centrally managed interchanges within TNCs (that cross international borders) guided by a highly ‘visible hand’. Intra-firm trade runs counter to the theory of comparative advantage that advises nations to specialize in products where factor endowments provide a comparative cost advantage. The mobility of capital and technology, and the extent to which firms trade with each other, means that ‘governments in virtually all industrial societies now take an active interest in trying to facilitate links between their own domestic firms – including offshoots of transnationals – and the global networks’ in strategic industries. Similarly, the globalization of the world economy has seen the spread of manufacturing industries to many developing countries and the relocation of transnational manufacturing centres to what are often low-wage, high-repression areas  – regions with low health and safety standards where organized labour is frequently suppressed or illegal. TNCs are becoming increasingly adept at circumventing national borders in their search for cheap labour and access to raw materials, and few states can refuse to play host to them. The creation of new centres of production occurs wherever profit opportunities can be maximized because investment decisions are governed by absolute profitability rather than comparative advantage. Modern trading conditions have diverged significantly from the assumptions that underpin the neo-liberal analysis of how markets and trade actually work. The internationalization of production, the mobility of capital and the dominance of transnational corporations are just three developments that render theories of comparative advantage anachronistic. The idea of national sovereign states trading with each other as discrete economic units is steadily becoming the exception rather than the rule. Neo-mercantilist theory, which stresses the maximization of national wealth, also fails to explain contemporary trade realities. A more accurate description is ‘corporate mercantilism’, with ‘managed commercial interactions within and among huge corporate groupings, and regular state intervention in the three major Northern blocs to subsidise and protect domestically-based international corporations and financial institutions’ (Chomsky 1994: 95). If there is such a thing as a nation’s comparative advantage, it is clearly a human achievement and certainly not a gift of nature. The third challenge to the relevance of the theory of comparative advantage is the steady erosion of the rules that have underpinned multilateral trade in the post-war era. While there has been a reduction in barriers to trade within blocs such as the European Union and the United States– Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA, formerly NAFTA), they have been raised between blocs. Tariffs have come down but they have been replaced by a wide assortment of non-tariff barriers (NTBs), including import quotas and voluntary restraint agreements. This is a concern to small, ‘fair’ traders that are incapable of matching the subsidies provided by Europeans and North Americans. Regardless of whether tariff barriers and NTBs are dismantled, the world market would

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not be ‘free’ in any meaningful sense, because of the power of the TNCs to control and distort markets through transfer pricing and other devices. The proliferation of free trade agreements and organizations such as USMCA, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the growing importance of international organizations such as the G8, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank is indicative of the influence of neo-liberalism in the post-Cold War period. These are powerful transnational bodies that embody free trade as their governing ideology. To their supporters, they provide developing societies with the only opportunity to overcome financial hardship and modernize their economies. To their critics, however, they impose free market strictures on developing societies. They are organizations that institutionalize market relationships between states. By locking the developing world into agreements that force them to lower their protective barriers, USMCA and the WTO, for example, prevent the South from developing trade profiles that diverge from the model dictated by their supposed ‘comparative advantage’. The IMF and the World Bank, on the other hand, make the provision of finance (or, more accurately, debt) to developing societies conditional on their unilateral acceptance of free market rules for their economies – the conditionality of the so-called structural adjustment policies. These institutions are criticized for imposing identical prescriptions for economic development on all countries, regardless of what conditions prevail locally. Developing societies are expected to adopt the free market blueprint (sometimes called the Washington Consensus)  – opening their economies up to foreign investment, financial deregulation, reductions in government expenditure and budgetary deficits, the privatization of government-owned enterprises, the abolition of protection and subsidies, developing export orientated economies  – or risk the withholding of much needed aid and finance. And because they are required to remove national controls on capital movements – which make it possible for states to reach their own conclusions about investment and spending priorities – the direction of their economic development is increasingly set by amorphous financial markets that act on profit opportunities rather than out of any consideration of national or community interest.

Sovereignty and Foreign Investment The enormous volumes of unregulated capital liberated by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s transformed the relationships between states and markets. Credit (bonds and loans), investment (foreign direct investment, or FDI) and money (foreign exchange) now flow more freely across the world than commodities. The resulting increase in the power of transnational capital and the diminution of national economic sovereignty is perhaps the most impressive realization of liberal economic ideas (Strange 1996, 1998). The relationship between a nation’s economic prosperity and the world’s money markets is decisive. Because most states are incapable of generating sufficient endogenous wealth to finance their economic development, governments need to provide domestic economic conditions that will attract foreign investment into their countries. In a world where capital markets are globally linked and money can be electronically transferred around the world in microseconds, states are judged in terms of their comparative ‘hospitality’ to foreign capital; that is, they must offer the most attractive investment climates to relatively scarce supplies of money. This gives the foreign investment community significant leverage over policy settings and the course of a nation’s economic development generally, and constitutes a diminution in the country’s economic sovereignty.

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The power of transnational finance capital in the modern period can scarcely be overestimated. The volume of foreign exchange trading in the major financial centres of the world, estimated at over US$5 trillion per day, has come to dwarf international trade by at least seventy times. UN statistics suggest that the world’s hundred largest TNCs, with assets exceeding many trillions of dollars, account for a third of the total FDI of their home states, giving them increasing influence over the economies of host countries (Phillips 2018). The brokers on Wall Street and in Tokyo, the clients of the ‘screen jockeys’ in the foreign exchange rooms and the auditors from credit ratings agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s pass daily judgements on the management of individual economies, and signal to the world’s financial community the comparative profit opportunities to be found in a particular country. Inappropriate interventionary policies by government can be quickly penalized with a (threatened) reduction in the nation’s credit rating, a ‘run’ (sell-off) on its currency or an investment ‘strike’. The requirements of the international markets can be ignored only at a nation’s economic peril. Finance markets, dominated by large banks and financial institutions, insurance companies, brokers and speculators, exist only to maximize their own wealth. There is no compelling reason for them to act in the interests of the poor, the homeless, the infirm or those who are deprived of their basic human rights by their own governments. States that cede economic sovereignty to these global players in the name of free trade and commerce therefore run the risk of elevating private commercial gain to the primary foreign policy objective of the state. When the foreign investment community is freed from state barriers and controls, and is able to choose the most profitable location for its capital, it has the effect of homogenizing the economic development of nation-states across the globe. In what is effectively a bidding war for much-needed infusions of capital, states are driven by the lowest common denominator effect to reduce their regulations, standards, wages and conditions in order to appear attractive to the investor community. Priority is given to the drive for efficiency and profits. The threat of disinvestment becomes the stick for markets to wield over the heads of government. For liberals, this is a pleasing reversal of modern history, which they see as a struggle for liberation from the clutches of arbitrary state power. Ironically, in many instances, the key to attracting overseas investment is for the host government to provide the transnational investor with subsidies and protection from market forces. In some cases, this is the only way states can win and maintain the confidence of global markets. The ill-fated 1995–1998 Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) and 2015–2016 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are vivid illustrations of just how far governments in the developed world have been prepared to follow liberal advice and surrender their discretionary economic power to the markets. In the former case, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development members were offering voluntarily to restrict their own ability to discriminate against foreign capital. The MAI and TPP are a reminder that, as with the establishment of national markets in the 19th century, globalization is not the result of the gradual and spontaneous emancipation of the economic sphere from government control. On the contrary, it has been the outcome of conscious and sometimes violent state intervention by advanced capitalist states. Just as domestically the labour market can be ‘freed’ only by legislative restrictions placed on trades unions, the creation of the post-war liberal trading regime and the deregulation of the world’s capital markets in the 1970s required deliberate acts by interventionary states.

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Under globalization, national economic sovereignty has not so much been lost but either enthusiastically given away or begrudgingly surrendered. The state’s capacity to direct the national economy has been deliberately and significantly undercut by the globalization of relations of production and exchange. Significant sovereign power has been ceded to bond holders, fund managers, currency traders, speculators, transnational banks and insurance companies – groups that by definition are democratically unaccountable in any national jurisdiction. In effect, the world economy has come to resemble the global strategic environment. It has become anarchic in character and, as a consequence, the competition for economic security is as intense as the search for strategic security. The irony in liberal economic thinking was exposed by the global financial crisis that began in 2007. Irresponsible lending practices by financial institutions and complex financial instruments few could understand almost brought the global financial system to its knees. Ultimately, only massive taxpayer-funded government bailouts prevented a great unwinding of the entire system in many leading economies, though many have still not recovered from the shock. The state, acting as lender of last resort, considered the largest investment banks to be too big to fail, a view paradoxically shared by the managers of private capital within them who, until this point, had trumpeted the virtues of free market policies. Although the bankers successfully thwarted moves to re-regulate the financial system after the peak of the crisis, in rescuing the global financial system the state clarified to all but the most devout free market liberals that the unstable, crisis-prone global economy of the 21st century is most accurately described as state capitalism (Baker 2010; Johnson and Kwak 2010; Mason 2010; Stiglitz 2010; Tooze 2018). The same applied when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020. Intervention in the economies of many states was necessary for growth stimulation and to cushion societies from the impact of another economic collapse. At the same time, the state was held to be responsible for public health measures that could only be implemented at the expense of economic growth. The greater the level of economic activity, the quicker the virus spread. It was a wicked dilemma for governments. Hobsbawm identified three areas where the power and authority of the state had been undermined by globalization. The first was where the state’s monopoly of coercive force was being eroded by non-state actors, such as terrorists, who seek weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, the commitment and loyalty of citizens to the state was weakening. The capacity for states to conscript citizens for military service, to administer colonial rule and to compel people to abide by the law (e.g. speed cameras, computer hacking and viruses, music downloading) was reducing. It was becoming more difficult for democratic governments to mobilize their populations for war, regardless of their ruling ideology. Finally, the ability of governments to provide public goods – arbitration, law and order, personal security and so on – had been damaged by the liberation of market forces, such as the privatization of state services and the deregulation of capital markets. The state as an essential unit of liberal democracy was weakening while public antipathy to globalization grew (Hobsbawm 2007).

Non-State Terrorism Whether or not Islamic militancy is the latest chapter in a long-standing revolt against the West, there can be little doubt that it represents a direct challenge to both the claim that liberal democracy is the universal destination for the species and the assumption that globalization is inexorable.

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However incoherent and unlikely it is as a political programme, Islamic terrorism is profoundly anti-secular and an opponent of liberal modernity (Gray 2004). It seems premature and misleading for liberals to claim that the emergence of Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups that perpetrate transnational terrorism constitutes a victory for the deterritorialization of world politics (Buzan 2003: 297, 303). Rather, as Harvey notes, ‘the war on terror, swiftly followed by the prospect of war with Iraq … [has] allowed the state to accumulate more power’, a claim difficult to refute and one that poses an unexpected challenge to liberals who believed that globalization was finally eroding the sovereign significance of the state (Harvey 2003: 17). The national security state has expanded. The resuscitation of state power across the industrialized world after the 9/11 attacks has taken numerous forms, including new restrictions on civil liberties, greater powers of surveillance and detention, increased military spending and the expansion of intelligence services. The threats posed by Islamic terror and the dangers of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have also been matched by an increase in state intervention around the world, in particular by US-led coalitions acting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. With each subsequent terrorist assault, states that consider themselves innocent victims have been emboldened to interfere in each others’ internal affairs – sometimes pre-emptively. Pre-emption, the disarmament of states alleged to possess WMD, regime change, humanitarianism and the spread of democracy have all been invoked as public justifications for these interventions, although critics have pointed to traditional geostrategic rationales beneath the surface. Many states, such as China, Israel and Russia, have also used the cover provided by the ‘war against terror’ to settle domestic scores with secessionists, dissidents and those resisting their territorial and colonial occupations. Others seem to be victims of ‘blowback’, reaping disastrous and unintended consequences from earlier foreign policy actions. Regardless of what the true motives of these interventions are, the irony of socially conservative, economically liberal governments expanding the reach and size of government should not be lost on anyone. The return of the overarching state is perhaps an unsurprising response to community calls for protection from non-state terrorism. When citizens of a state require emergency medical relief, as many victims of the Bali bombings did in October 2002, there was little point appealing to market forces for help. Nor can those responsible for attacks such as the Beslan school atrocity in September 2004 or the Christchurch massacre in 2019 be hunted down, disarmed and prosecuted by privately owned TNCs. The same is true of medical treatments for COVID-19. Even if the state remains ambivalent about insulating its citizens from the vicissitudes of the world economy, it is still expected to secure them from the threats of terrorism and disease. Only the state can meet these and many other challenges, such as border protection and the threat of transnational crime. There are no market-based solutions to the dangers posed by pandemics and the latest chapter in the revolt against the West. Since the end of the Cold War, realists such as Kenneth Waltz have argued that in the absence of effective countervailing pressures, the United States is likely to become increasingly unilateral in seeking to secure its foreign policy interests, and in so doing rely on military power to realize its vision of a new world order. The ‘war against terror’ has seemingly changed little in this regard. If anything, these events have enhanced a trend that some liberals had either believed or hoped had passed into history. Hobsbawm has observed that ‘the basic element to understanding the present situation is that 9/11 did not threaten the US. It was a terrible human tragedy which humiliated the US, but in

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no sense was it any weaker after those attacks. Three, four or five attacks will not change the position of the US or its relative power in the world’ (Hobsbawm 2002). This view is similar to Waltz’s claim that the problem of terrorism does not challenge the continuities of international politics. ‘Although terrorists can be terribly bothersome’, says Waltz, ‘they hardly pose threats to the fabric of a society or the security of the state … Terrorism does not change the first basic fact of international politics – the gross imbalance of world power’ in favour of the United States. ‘Instead, the effect of September 11 has been to enhance American power and extend its military presence in the world’ (Waltz 2002: 348–353). Realists in the United States also led the intellectual opposition to Washington’s attack on Iraq in March 2003, arguing that Saddam Hussein had been successfully contained, that he was prevented from using his WMD against the West because of the likely consequences to him and that for similar reasons he couldn’t risk passing these weapons – if he in fact possessed them – to groups such as Al-Qaeda. As during the Second Cold War in the Reagan era, realists found themselves in the unusual position of being at the limits of respectable dissent in debates over the Iraq war as a consequence of the influence of the misnamed neo-conservatives, whose muscular liberalism underwrote the administration of George W. Bush (Mearsheimer and Walt 2002; Hobsbawm 2007).

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, it was argued that liberalism was an ‘inside-out’ approach to international relations, because liberals favour a world in which the endogenous determines the exogenous. Their challenge is to extend the legitimacy of domestic political arrangements found within democratic states to the relationships between all nation-states. Liberals believe that democratic society, in which civil liberties are protected and market relations prevail, can have an international analogue in the form of a peaceful global order. The domestic free market has its counterpart in the open, globalized world economy. Parliamentary debate and accountability is reproduced in international fora such as the United Nations; and the legal protection of civil rights within liberal democracies is extended to the promotion of human rights across the world. With the collapse of communism as an alternative political and economic order, the potential for continuity between the domestic and the international became greater than in any previous period. Fukuyama had reason to be optimistic. The spread of liberal democracies and the zone of peace was an encouraging development, as is the realization by states that trade and commerce are more closely correlated with economic success than territorial conquest. The number of governments enjoying civilian rather than military rule has increased, and ethical considerations of human justice have a permanent place on the diplomatic agenda. There can be little doubt that the great powers are now much less inclined to use force to resolve their political differences with each other, and it appears that liberal democracies are in the process of constructing a separate peace. The globalization of the world economy means that there are few obstacles to international trade. Liberals want to remove the influence of the state in commercial relations between businesses and individuals, and the decline of national economic sovereignty is an indication that the influence of the state is diminishing. TNCs and capital markets wield significant influence over the shape of the world economy, in the process homogenizing the political economies of every member state of the international community.

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Globalization has undermined the nation-state in other ways that have pleased liberals. The capacity of each state to direct the political loyalties of its citizens has been weakened by an increasing popular awareness of the problems faced by the entire human species. The state cannot prevent its citizens turning to a range of subnational and transnational agents to secure their political identities and promote their political objectives. Sovereignty is no longer an automatic protection against external interference called ‘humanitarian intervention’. And decision-making on a range of environmental, economic and security questions has become internationalized, rendering national administration less important than transnational political cooperation. Despite these important developments, there are also counter-trends that can be identified. Realists would argue that liberals such as Ohmae are premature in announcing the demise of the nation-state. They would remind the enthusiasts for globalization that as a preferred form of political community, the nation-state still has no serious rival. There are currently around 200 nation-­ states in the world asserting their political independence, and the figure grows each year. Realists cite a number of important powers retained by the state despite globalization, including monopoly control of the weapons of war and their legitimate use, and the sole right to tax its citizens. They would argue that only the nation-state can still command the political allegiances of its citizens or adjudicate in disputes between them. And it is still only the nation-state that has the exclusive authority to bind the whole community to international law. They would question the extent to which globalization today is an unprecedented phenomenon, citing the 19th century as period when similar levels of economic interdependence existed. They would also point to the growing number of states that reject the argument that Western modernity is universally valid or that political development always terminates at liberal-capitalist democracy. Realists have highlighted the expanding reach of the state as a result of the latest wave of anti-Western Islamic militancy – a significant reversal for liberals who anticipated the imminent demise of the nation-state. Islamism is a direct challenge to liberal assumptions about economics and politics terminating at a liberal capitalist consensus. Those who welcome the demise of the state in international commerce will similarly be perplexed by the need for extensive government intervention to prevent a greater financial catastrophe after 2007 and a pandemic-induced recession in 2020. When markets fail, all eyes look to the state for a rescue, including those champions of market forces that drove the financial system to the precipice. An increasingly crisis-prone global economy has dented the confidence of those who believe capitalism can be successfully managed without government regulation. Unpredictable challenges have left liberalism on the back foot, questioning whether the linear path to improving the human condition is as straight and as inexorable as was thought only a few short years ago.

Glossary Terms Globalization: The intensification and stretching of social and economic relations across the globe. Economic interdependence: The mutual economic dependence of states on each other. Universal human rights: Benchmark standards for states to uphold in the treatment of their citizens regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, nationality or economic circumstances.

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Further Reading Dunne, T. and Flockhart, T. (eds.) (2013) Liberal World Orders (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hunt, L. (2007) Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W.Norton). Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press). Russett, B. (1994) Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

POSTCOLONIALISM ALINA SAJED

4

Can we understand International Relations without colonialism and race? This chapter argues that we cannot examine the domain of the ‘international’ without a meaningful engagement with the crucial role that colonialism and processes of racialization and capitalist expansion have played in the very constitution of our current international system. Postcolonial theory grapples with the history and legacies of colonialism, and of race and racial hierarchies, and examines the ways in which they have shaped global politics and contemporary racial hierarchies. IR theory has failed to analyse these power structures and dynamics, and postcolonial theories have aimed to ignite debate and reflection in the discipline about its own foundations, and about its contemporary colonial and racist dynamics. The ‘international’ designation of the discipline suggests a wider geopolitical space and coverage where a variety of societies are included in the study of international relations. However, the uninitiated student of world politics will be both surprised and disappointed to discover that the discipline has consistently excluded two-thirds of humanity from the ambit of international relations. Put differently, for a long time, the discipline has focused almost exclusively on the Western world (understood as including Western Europe, North America, Australia and occasionally Japan), without a serious consideration of political processes in Latin America, Africa, Asia or much of the Balkans. Such a focus is all the more ironic and puzzling given disciplinary claims to uncovering the universal dynamics of international politics. According to realist and some liberal theories of international relations, the main units of analysis in IR are states: the international system is one characterized by anarchy given the lack of a centralized overarching authority to manage the behaviour of states; therefore, given a perpetual state of anarchy, states are pursuing their own self-interest by maximizing their predominance in the system and thus ensuring their survival (see Chapters 1 and 2). This parsimonious story IR tells to and about itself (Weber 2001) accomplishes a number of erasures. First, it assigns responsibility for the violence of the system to a purportedly ahistorical impersonal context, namely that of ‘anarchy’. Secondly, for realists, this effectively erases any moral or ethical responsibility of clearly identifiable state/non-state actors because it implies that the predatory behaviour of certain states is not their own responsibility but rather such behaviour is prompted and thus justified by an anarchical system. For liberals, however, the dilemma of anarchy can be overcome (in principle) through international cooperation and international institutions. This solution implies more concretely the spread of democracy and of free trade as approaches to preventing conflict and thus mitigating the dangers of an anarchical system.

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What happens, though, when a country is not interested either in liberal democracy or in capitalism? As many postcolonial scholars illustrate (and as many postcolonial states soon find out after independence), liberal democracies are prompt to wage war on those they consider outside the purview of their own standards of civilization (democracy and capitalism). Thirdly, the stories of anarchy (as in realist accounts) and of international cooperation (as in liberal accounts) also occlude the steep power differentials and hierarchies operating within the system, and thus the very deliberate atrocious violence needed to sustain such hierarchies. In an anarchical self-help international system, structures and processes such as colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism and sexism are given little to no attention since it is the system that prompts states to seek their own self-interest and survival irrespective of historical context, cultural characteristics or position in the geopolitical system. Put differently, the story of anarchy naturalizes hierarchy as an international fait accompli by sketching a competitive international system where only the strongest (or the ‘civilized’, in liberal accounts) will survive and thrive. However, as discussed later in the chapter, such a supposedly neutral and ahistorical perspective is not colour blind or race-neutral. On the contrary, Errol Henderson (2013: 71–72) illustrates how the story of anarchy, as told by mainstream approaches in IR, derives its ‘notions of anarchy from social contract theses that are based in a racist dualism that dichotomizes humanity and the relations of states composed of different peoples’. The implications of this argument are as follows: (1) the discipline weaves a story about self-interested competition among states in the international realm; (2) such a story rests on deeply racist assumptions about states (usually Western/ European) that are ‘naturally’ superior, civilized and strong vis-à-vis the rest of humanity (non-­ Western/non-white states); and (3) this story leads to the assumption that some states are thus ‘naturally’ justified in dominating and exploiting the system. The last two points illustrate how hierarchy becomes naturalized in the international system. Postcolonial theories generally agree to date the beginning of the modern international system to the colonial conquest of the Americas in the 15th century. A story of the modern international system that starts with 1492 and the subsequent conquest/pillaging of the Americas (Todorov 1984; Galeano 1997, 2010) might look strikingly different from the story of anarchy. Such a story would highlight the central role of the European colonial enterprise that engulfed most of humanity and transformed capitalism into an economic enterprise of global proportions. Indeed, a story that starts with colonial conquest and domination provincializes the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as simply an episode in Western European history, and not as the landmark moment that somehow kicked off international relations. Recent postcolonial scholarship questions the validity of the story of Westphalia as the story of the emergence of the modern nation-state system. Gurminder Bhambra (2016), for instance, argues that the states used as illustrations for the emergence of the modern state were in fact colonial and imperial states, and not strictly nation-states. This entails that colonial histories were constitutive of the modern European state system and not external to it. Similarly, Gary Wilder (2005: 3) opens his book with this thought-provoking interrogation: ‘What are we to make of the fact that republican France was never not an imperial nation-state?’ If the reality of empire and of colonial domination is in fact foundational to the very history of modern European states, why is such a reality absent from accounts of the state-system in IR? Postcolonial theories in IR then pursue a two-pronged goal: to make visible the role of colonialism and of empire in the establishment of the modern state system; and to highlight the imperial/ colonial roots of the discipline of IR.

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The first section of this chapter outlines the history of postcolonialism as a theoretical perspective by discussing a few major historical landmarks associated with the rise of postcolonial thought (e.g. Bandung Conference; Non-Aligned Movement; Suez Crisis; Tricontinental Conference) and a number of prominent theoretical contributions by intellectuals who are now seen as ‘foundational’ to postcolonial theory (e.g. Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said). The second section then examines postcolonialism’s entry into International Relations by focusing on a number of key concepts that are central to postcolonial interventions in IR: colonialism, race, and epistemic justice. The last section engages the interactions and debates between postcolonial perspectives in IR and other critical approaches in IR (e.g. post-structuralism, Marxism and feminism). The concluding section highlights the continued relevance of postcolonial perspectives in a global world.

‘The Third World Was Not a Place, It Was a Project’ Postcolonialism considers the history of the modern world system by starting from the premise that the colonial experience shaped and continues to shape world politics in fundamental ways (see Manjapra 2020). Postcolonial theory reminds us that the transatlantic slave trade (which took place between the 16th and the 19th centuries), for instance, is crucial to understanding the modern world system. More to the point, the colonial experience has shaped the identity of the West and of the Western self in fundamental ways (see Nandy 1983; Césaire 2000; Inayatulah and Blaney 2004). On that note, if the colonial experience has been so constitutive of the very identity of the modern Western self, how can the West understand itself outside this experience? Postcolonialism entails the dual task of examining this history from the perspectives of those impacted by colonialism, on the one hand, and of understanding its ramifications into the present, on the other, with particular attention on how colonial power and violence continues to shape contemporary structures, processes and institutions. While the 19th century was the heyday of imperial domination – by the beginning of the 20th century, nine-tenths of the world was under European occupation – the 20th century can be seen as the moment of reappropriating dignity and control by the peoples under European colonial occupation (Young 2001: 2, 4). Postcolonial theory can therefore be seen as the direct product of the struggles for liberation and emancipation of societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Intellectuals from these colonized societies attempted to conceptualize processes of domination and exploitation, as well as ideas of freedom, dignity and alternatives for a more just and equitable international system. Decolonization can be understood as a long-term process of both removing colonial occupation and administration (via national liberation and anticolonial struggles), and of grappling with the cultural, intellectual, psycho-­affective and social effects of colonial domination. In 1950, Aimé Césaire published his Discourse on Colonialism, one of the most important texts in postcolonial theory and considered to be one of the foundational theoretical articulations of the ideas of colonial violence and colonial power. Césaire was a poet, a teacher (he was one of Frantz Fanon’s mentors) and a political leader from Martinique. The context in which his Discourse was published was significant indeed: the French colonial massacres in Algeria at Guelma and Sétif, the anticolonial insurrection in Madagascar in 1947 where thousands were massacred by the French colonial army, the atrocious bombardment of Haiphong, Vietnam, by the French colonial armies. Little wonder then that Césaire’s text is not only a searing indictment of the crimes of colonialism

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but also, as Robin D.G. Kelley (2000: 7) stated, ‘a declaration of war’. With poetic precision and biting sarcasm steeped in rage and meticulous scholarship, Césaire provides a damning inventory of the atrocities of European colonialism, upending the narrative that Europe’s colonial enterprise served to enlighten and civilize these societies. In fact, Césaire’s (2000: 35) claim is that colonialism de-civilized these societies. Discourse highlights also ‘the devastating impact of capitalist expansion on the colonies where raw materials and human labour were extracted under regimes of slavery, systematic violence, and ruthless exploitation from colonial societies’ (Persaud and Sajed 2018: 3). Key Concept: Colonialism Colonialism is the conquest and control by European powers of various societies from the Americas, Africa and Asia for the purpose of annexing their territories and controlling their resources (land, natural resources and labour). Three defining features distinguish colonialism from other forms of conquest and domination (see also Persaud and Sajed 2018). European colonialism introduced and expanded the capitalist mode of production to the rest of the world, fundamentally changing and permanently restructuring local economies (Amin 1976; Wolf 2010; Rodney 2012). The conquest and domination were justified

through racism, an ideology that claimed that humanity is organized hierarchically into racial types with some groups being ‘naturally’ superior to others (Vucetic 2011; Vucetic and Persaud 2018). These racial hierarchies are a unique feature of colonialism, with ongoing repercussions and reverberations into our contemporary present. Moreover, the colonial enterprise has produced a corpus of academic knowledge whereby domination, exploitation and claims of ‘innate’ superiority were deemed both necessary (‘the white man’s burden’) and desirable (‘the civilizing mission’) (Said 1979, 1994).

Five years after Césaire published his Discourse, one of the most significant landmarks in the 20th century’s history of decolonization took place, the 1955 Bandung Conference. The event brought together delegates from twenty-nine nations from Asia and Africa, representing at the time a quarter of the world’s population. Leadership in the organizing of the conference came from five countries and their five leaders: Sukarno of Indonesia, U Nu of Burma, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Mohammed Ali of Pakistan and John Kotelawala of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Bandung is associated with the creation of a Third World bloc, that is with a global project that produced a ‘transcontinental political consciousness in Africa and Asia’ (Young 2001: 191). Latin America would be added later, in 1966, with the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. As Vijay Prashad (2007: xv) reminds us, ‘[t]he Third World was not a place. It was a project.’ B.S. Chimni (2017: 35) notes that ‘the idea of the Third World was born’ at this conference, amid the deliberations around ideas of anticolonial struggle and around varied understandings of anti-imperialism. I should briefly mention here, however, the vibrant feminist scholarship that critiques the male-dominated/centred scholarship on Bandung. Feminists point both to the erasure of prior Third World women’s international conferences and the male-dominated character of the Bandung event itself (see, for example, Armstrong 2016). As the Cold War was unfolding in full force, demanding unwavering loyalty to one of the two superpowers (either the USA or the USSR), Sukarno, Nehru, U Nu and, later, Nasser of Egypt advocated for a third path that steered clear of either of the major ideological commitments, ­capitalism or communism. Indeed, one of the consequences of the conference was, as Vijay Prashad

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(2007: 41) observes, the creation of a United Nations bloc that would bring together representatives from Africa, Asia and later Latin America, and dominate the General Assembly for decades to come. Another significant legacy of Bandung was the articulation of an economic alternative for the Third World that was meant to provide a different path to development to that imposed by the dominant capitalist model. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, established in 1964, is the direct product of Bandung, and emphasizes engagement in trade and development by the Third World on an equitable basis. The establishment of this UN body is significant because it was the first time that the Third World institutionalized, at an international level, its clear aspirations for political and economic sovereignty. Arguably, one of the most enduring legacies of Bandung was the creation of the ‘Bandung spirit’, a term that captures both the idea of Third World solidarity and the expression by the Third World of a desire to be recognized as an agent in world politics and not simply as subordinate to Western interests. In the words of Vijay Prashad (2007: 45–46), ‘[t]he audacity of Bandung produced its own image’ (see also Pasha 2013). The historical context in which the Bandung conference took place and in which Césaire wrote his Discourse was one that saw the rise of anticolonial discourse and struggles, and the reclaiming of political autonomy by formerly colonized societies. One such landmark moment was undoubtedly the Suez Crisis of 1956, an event that, according to many historians, officially spelled the end of British and French colonial empires, the demise of their global hegemony and the rise of the USA as the new global hegemon (Kyle 2003; Peden 2012). At the centre of the crisis was the figure of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had recently come to power in Egypt. Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal to fund the Aswan Dam, a project deemed crucial to modernizing Egyptian agriculture, prompted an international crisis when a tripartite coalition made up of British, French and Israeli forces invaded Egypt to reclaim the canal. The coalition was diplomatically defeated at the UN, and forced to withdraw. The Suez Canal had long been a symbol of colonial humiliation and exploitation as it had been built through the use of Egyptian labour in a system of quasi-slavery. In his fiery public speech in which he announced to the nation the nationalization of the canal, Nasser indicated that over 120,000 Egyptians had built it, many of them dying in the process. It is not surprising then that Nasser saw the nationalization not only as providing much-needed income for Egypt, but also restoring the dignity of the Egyptian people. Vijay Prashad (2007: 100) argues that the Suez Crisis accelerated the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. The latter saw representatives from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe come together to create an institution that would allow them to pursue as a united bloc a number of pressing global issues, such as global nuclear disarmament and the democratization of the United Nations.

Key Concept: Anticolonialism Anticolonialism is the historical mobilization and struggle against colonial rule by local actors/ groups/communities, generally located in the first six or seven decades of the 20th century (although the timeline needs to be modified when including Latin America). As a body of thought, anticolonial thought articulates theoretically both the charac-

teristics of domination and exploitation by the colonizer, and the forms of mobilization, the political and social terms, and the horizons conducive to emancipation and liberation. Some scholars (Young 2001; Pham and Shilliam 2016) see anticolonial thought as the predecessor of postcolonial theory. This chapter adopts this perspective.

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In 1961, Frantz Fanon published his Wretched of the Earth, arguably one of the best known and most influential political texts on political violence and national liberation of the 20th century. Fanon was a psychiatrist and political theorist from Martinique. He was the most noted intellectual associated with the Algerian anticolonial struggle, and his political writings are considered to be some of the most significant texts on national liberation, race and colonial domination of the 20th century. If Césaire’s Discourse focuses primarily on the effects of colonial violence on collective societies, Fanon’s work (both Wretched of the Earth and Black Skins, White Masks) examines the mechanisms through which one becomes a ‘colonial subject’, namely the ways through which individuals and collectives are dehumanized and objectified. Fanon had glimpses of the violence of the colonial system while a medical student in Lyon  – where he had his first encounters with Algerian labourers and the vivid racism to which they were subjected. But it was during his stay in colonial Algeria – his first position as a psychiatrist – that he was fully exposed to the sheer dehumanization of an entire society. Fanon’s work thus attempts to grapple not only with the social, economic and political effects of colonialism on colonial societies, but also examines the psychiatric and psychological conditions associated with the long-term violence of colonialism, with its structures of exploitation, racism and dehumanization (see Fanon 1967). Wretched of the Earth is an analysis of the various mechanisms of colonial violence in French Algeria, of the opportunities and pitfalls presented by anticolonial struggle and mobilization, as well as a call to action against colonial domination and imperialism. In the first chapter, ‘On Violence’ (probably his best-known piece of writing), Fanon illustrates the magnitude – both structural and individual – of the violence needed to sustain the colonial system in Algeria. Here he states that colonial violence is overwhelming in its manifestations and effects (political, social, cultural, economic and psycho-affective), and thus permeates every sphere of Algerian society. Given this overwhelming violence, the only way through which the colonized can regain their dignity and thus their humanity is through violent resistance. One cannot overemphasize the profound influence Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth has had on the field of postcolonial studies, given its emphasis on the issue of national culture as part of decolonization and anticolonial struggles. Among the many points of influence (see Gordon 2015), Fanon developed a sociological framework for understanding anti-Black racism; he meticulously engaged the idea of neo-colonialism and the forms of continued dependency and domination in post-­ independence societies; and examined the idea and the reality of being a colonial subject/object. This idea of seeing oneself simultaneously a subject and an object (of the colonial gaze) had been conceptualized earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, by the eminent African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois (2007: 8) as ‘double consciousness’ (see also Chapters 6 and 8, on Marxism and feminism, respectively): ‘this sense of looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’. Or, as Robert Young (2001: 274) notes, the questions Fanon taps into in his work are questions pertinent to understanding both the colonial past and the postcolonial present: ‘What was it like to find yourself transformed into a colonial subject? How does it feel to have your culture devalued and appropriated, your language debased into a vernacular, detached from all forms of power which are accessible and enacted only in a foreign tongue?’ As discussed later, Edward Said (1979) takes up these questions further in his theory of orientalism. Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence emerged in a context of revolutionary fervour, as the Algerian War was unravelling, the Vietnam War was in full swing and there were numerous

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anticolonial struggles both in Africa and Asia, while in Latin America Che Guevara was testing his theory of foco (Guevara 1961; Prashad 2007: 107; Débray 2017). At the same time, counter-­ revolutionary efforts by European states and especially by the USA were happening in full force; as Vijay Prashad (2007: 106) reminds us, this was a time when the American government gave the ‘green light for coups in Bolivia, Brazil, the Congo, Greece, and Indonesia’. It is in this context that in 1966 the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, also known as the Tricontinental Conference, took place in Havana. Little wonder that the issue at the heart of heated debates at the conference was armed struggle, not only as an anticolonial tactic but also ‘as a strategy in itself’ (Prashad 2007: 107). The Tricontinental, as several intellectuals point out, marks a significant in North/South relations shift from attempts at diplomacy and negotiation/compromise to armed struggle and revolutionary violence (Abdel Malek 1981; Prashad 2007; Young 2018). Egyptian political scientist Anouar Abdel Malek (1981: 108) notes there was a noticeable process of radicalization between Bandung and Havana. At Bandung, the national liberation programme had been put forth by slightly radical bourgeois elites; the Havana conference, however, marked an orientation towards a more radical position of militancy. Fidel Castro’s fiery speech at the Tricontinental highlighted the urgency of armed struggle against external imperialist forces. He emphasized Cuba’s efforts at spearheading revolution in Latin America as well as its material solidarity with anticolonial/anti-imperial struggles (Abdel Malek 1981: 110). Abdel Malek (1981: 85–86) draws attention to Che Guevara’s message to the Tricontinental (‘Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams’), where the latter speaks to and on behalf of the ‘we, the exploited people of the world’. Abdel Malek sees this as a fundamental shift from a more dogmatic Marxist identification of the exploited with the proletariat to a more global, a more encompassing identity of the oppressed. Robert Young (2001: 212–213) sees this as no less than the birth of the global postcolonial subject, ‘where a general internationalist counter-hegemonic position was elaborated by a [tricontinental] dispossessed subject of imperialism’. Indeed, the question of who is the collective postcolonial subject is incredibly important to postcolonial theory: is there such a thing as a collective postcolonial subject? Who are ‘the exploited’, ‘the oppressed’? The answer to this question is pertinent to postcolonial approaches in IR, especially as they grapple with transnational and global connections across the Global South (see Grovogui 2011; Pham and Shilliam 2016) and between spaces in the Global South and Global North. Postcolonialism, as a field of studies, has drawn and continues to draw theoretical strength from these historical landmarks and the various anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean (and the theoretical articulations associated with them). Nonetheless, the question remains how it emerged as an academic field of studies. Put differently, how did anticolonial discourses and praxis find their way into academia? It is not an exaggeration to credit the emergence of postcolonial studies as an academic field to Edward Said and his Orientalism, arguably one of the most impactful academic interventions in humanities and social sciences in the second half of the 20th century. What distinguishes Said’s intervention from previous theoretical articulations of colonialism and anticolonialism is his central concern with issues of representation and discourse, more specifically with the power of knowledge production (see Chapter 10). While questions of identity/subjectivity, knowledge production and representation had been articulated before Said (see, for example, Fanon 1967, 2004; Du Bois 2007), what made his intervention so dramatic was

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its systematic focus on the intimate relation between the production of knowledge (literary, political, academic, etc.) and processes of colonial conquest. Said (1979: 3) defines ‘Orientalism’ ‘as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’. In that sense, to produce knowledge about the ‘Orient’ is never innocent because the knowledge produced is always part of hierarchical configurations of power and domination. Simply put, the knowledge produced serves two overarching purposes: it casts the ‘Orient’ as a space confined by a set of negative characteristics such as despotic, lazy, barbaric, feminized and passive, and thus sensual, steeped in tradition and religion; on the other hand, the Western/European space is meant to be projected as enlightened, rational, civilized, masculine modern and forward-looking. The knowledge produced about the Orient (and the steep power hierarchies it entails between West and East) is disseminated not only in popular culture, literary texts and academic knowledge, but it is also present in scientific discourses, foreign policy, political and economic analysis, and, even more perniciously, internalized by the colonized themselves (see Inayatulah and Blaney 2004). This system of representations has been used for the purpose of controlling and dominating the ‘Orient’. In Said’s words, by the 19th century, ‘[t]he cumulative effect of decades of so sovereign a Western handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space’ (Said 1979: 211). The knowledge produced here about the ‘Orient’ was never innocent or neutral, but rather part of the larger colonial enterprise of conquest and domination.

 ostcolonialism in IR: Colonialism, Race, P and Epistemic Justice Postcolonial perspectives in IR put forth the following claims: that colonialism has been central to the making and transformation of our contemporary world system; that race as a structuring category and racism as an ideology of domination and as a set of practices are entrenched in the sociopolitical and economic structures of the international, and shape policies and decision-making processes in fundamental ways; that understanding the shape of the current global economy is inconceivable without considering processes of capitalist expansion via colonialism and imperialism; that knowledge production about non-Western spaces/actors is never innocent but rather always part of racialized and gendered power relations (see also Persaud and Sajed 2018: 2). This section thus examines three major themes taken on by postcolonial theory in IR: colonialism, race, and epistemic justice. In engaging the complexities of colonialism, postcolonial approaches in IR have had a dual focus: on the one hand, they excavate events, actors, voices and perspectives from the Global South/Third World that have rarely or never received any attention in analyses of world politics; on the other hand, they engage contemporary processes and phenomena in world politics through the lenses of colonial difference, race, imperialism and capitalist expansion understood as neocolonialism. The former has translated into a set of studies and explorations that self-consciously aims to build a counter-history of world politics, of the international, seeking to present voices, perspectives and events from the (former) colonial world. This ethos towards creating a repository of non-Western knowledges and perspectives has animated various postcolonial analyses in IR in the

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last couple of decades (see el-Malik and Kamola 2017). For example, there has been a renewed interest within postcolonial IR for the types of historical landmarks discussed in the previous section, such as the Bandung Conference, the Tricontinental Conference in Havana and the Suez Crisis (see, for instance, Pham and Shilliam 2016; Hobson and Sajed 2017; Salem 2020). The purpose of these analyses is not simply to revisit historical moments, but rather to understand in a fuller context current processes such as solidarity (and the limits thereof) in the Global South, the rise of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), processes of political violence, refugee and migrant flows, the debt crisis in the Global South, practices of sovereignty, development and others. Examining the life and politics of eminent Third World political figures such as Thomas Sankara (Murrey 2018), Amílcar Cabral (1980), Hô Chí Minh and José Martí (Pham and Méndez 2015) or Kwame Nkrumah (Emiljanowicz 2019), for instance, is valuable not only because we become acquainted with important political characters outside the West, but also because these studies expose us to different visions/understandings of freedom, sovereignty, development and modernity seen from the perspective of colonized intellectuals and anticolonial and postcolonial leaders. Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé revolutionary and president of Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987, articulated theoretically ideas of development, social justice and foreign policy, and initiated successful programmes of development that included ‘mass vaccinations, infrastructure improvements, the expansion of women’s rights, encouragement of domestic agricultural consumption, and anti-desertification projects’ (Campbell 2018: xiv). Sankara’s vision provides us with an understanding of development that emphasizes the dignity and agency of communities and individuals as opposed to mainstream views of development, which emphasize expertise by Western actors and institutions. Examining Sankara’s speeches at the UN gives us a crucial insight into the efforts made by anticolonial leaders to bring issues of racism, enduring Eurocentrism and the many injustices of global capitalism (such as the debt crisis in the Third World) within the fora of the United Nations (Sankara 2007; Koomen 2019: 397). Edward Said (1994: 2) stated that ‘[w]e are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore the empires and the imperial context in our studies’. A question posed earlier in the chapter asked what a story of international relations might look like if we start from the premise that processes of colonialism were crucial to shaping our current world system in a variety of ways, political, economic, social and cultural. Numerous contributions within postcolonial IR have brought to light the manifold facets of the colonial and postcolonial/post-independence experience, and the ways in which they are central to our understanding of modern and contemporary world politics. We cannot, for instance, understand capitalism without the colonial experience (see Chapter 6). As mentioned earlier, the long history of European colonialism that spanned over 500 years included (among other things) violent processes of extraction of raw resources from the colonies, the slave trade, which provided labour for those colonies whose economy was organized around plantations, and ruthless exploitation and expropriation of the land of local populations. IR scholar Robbie Shilliam (2015: 185; also quoted in Krishna 2018: 21) notes that ‘global capital starts with colonialism … a plantation on expropriated land next to a provision ground – and not in a factory next to an enclosure’. This is an important statement because it highlights that the emergence of global capitalism and industrialization were not self-generated phenomena from within Europe/the West, as much modernization literature would have us believe. Rather, as a

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number of scholars have compellingly shown, the Industrial Revolution and global modernity would not have emerged without the colonial experience (see Stavrianis 1981; Wolf 2010; Rodney 2012). Postcolonial scholars in IR explore the ways in which the transatlantic slave trade and processes of slavery have been central to the development of the contemporary global political economy (Shilliam 2012; Gruffydd-Jones 2013). A number of tools essential to the global financial system, such as credit, marine insurance and joint-stock companies, would not have emerged in their current form without the experience of the transatlantic slave trade (Inikori 2002; Baucom 2005; Gruffydd-Jones 2013). A story of IR that starts with the colonial experience also exposes the limited geopolitical and methodological scope with which mainstream approaches in the discipline operate: the colonial experience was essentially a transnational experience, even as it linked and involved various levels (local, regional, national and transnational). Therefore, focusing exclusively on the nation-state as the main unit of analysis misses the complexity of the types of processes, actors and interactions involved in the shaping of our current world system. For instance, the idea of development as a national phenomenon makes little sense, since both processes of development and underdevelopment were conditioned by their integration into global/international networks of capitalist expansion during colonialism (Inayatulah and Blaney 2018: 126; see also Amin 1976). In that sense, postcolonial scholars in IR have produced analyses that have moved both beyond and below the nation-state and thus illustrated that international relations cannot be reduced to state to state interactions (see Grovogui 2006; Rao 2010; Sajed 2013). Given the enormous violence needed to initiate and sustain a colonial world system for over five centuries, the value of postcolonial critique lies in its understanding of the international system not as one of equal adversaries (namely nation-­ states) competing for survival and security in an anarchical system, but rather as one of profound inequality and violence (Biswas 2014; Persaud 2018; Persaud and Kumarakulasingam 2019). Exploring race, racialization and racism in international relations has been one of the fastestgrowing foci of analysis for postcolonial approaches in IR. One cannot take seriously the notion that the international system is deeply hierarchical without looking at the racialized hierarchies that underpin and sustain the unequal and violent character of the system. Indeed, over the last decade, there has been a sustained attention to race in IR both in regard to examining the racist origins of the discipline and the ways in which racist assumptions continue to inform current analyses of world politics. The former translated into an impressive effort at excavating the racist roots of the discipline both by omission and by commission. Put differently, postcolonial scholars in IR have explored the reasons for which the category of race has been rendered invisible in IR despite its omnipresent reality both in everyday life and in international relations (see Vitalis 2005, 2017; Hoziç 2016; Rutazibwa 2016). IR scholar Robert Vitalis (2005) undertakes a genealogy of the birth of the discipline. He indicates that at its inception, as an academic discipline in the USA, IR studied ‘the dynamics of imperialism and nationalism, and seeking practical strategies for better ways of administering territories and uplifting backward races, using what were seen as the progressive tools of racial science’ (Vitalis 2005: 163). Unironically, one of the best known of IR publications today and the first IR journal in the USA, Foreign Affairs, was named at its establishment in 1910 Journal of Race Development (Vitalis 2005: 161). In 1919, it changed its name to Journal of International Relations. A few years later, the Council on Foreign Relations took it over and changed its name to Foreign Affairs, the title under which it operates today (Vitalis 2005: 161).

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IR scholars such as Vitalis (2005, 2017), Srdjan Vucetic (2011) and John M. Hobson (2012) have undertaken detailed genealogies of the discipline of International Relations (whether in its American format or its Western European iterations). Their analyses have illustrated the enduring (indeed obsessive) preoccupation of a variety of thinkers, policymakers and scholars with race and race-mixing (miscegenation). These figures (Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Hans Morgenthau, Woodrow Wilson and Hannah Arendt, among others) and their analyses were highly influential on, and some of them were foundational to, the discipline of IR.  Postcolonial analyses in IR emphasize the importance of excavating the white supremacist perspectives that founded the discipline and the way in which they continue to be influential in contemporary scholarship. For instance, it always comes as a great shock to students to find out that Woodrow Wilson, hailed as an advocate of liberal internationalism and one of the leading architects of the League of Nations, had incredibly racist views and policies towards immigrants, indigenous and Black communities. His views on race were inspired by the same eugenicist theories that would inspire Hitler’s project later on (Hobson 2012: 167–175). Given the centrality of ‘race’ and ‘race thinking’ to the origins of the discipline, and, indeed, to so many processes of world politics, why have theories of international relations had so little (indeed virtually nothing) to say about race in IR (Vitalis 2005: 160; see also Krishna 2006)? As Vitalis (2005: 161) notes, before the Second World War, ‘races and states were the discipline-in-­ formation’s most important twin-units of analysis’. Postcolonial scholars in IR note that despite the disappearance of ‘race’ as a category from IR scholarship after the Second World War, the discipline’s most ‘beloved’ concepts and terms are underpinned by racial logics. Anievas et  al. (2014: 9–10) indicate that ‘not only is the emergence of the nation-state, and capitalist modernity as a project more generally, inextricably linked to racial logics, [but so is] the very persistence of these logics in contemporary liberal humanitarian intervention, nation-building and modern slavery and trafficking’. Moreover, as the same authors point out, such racial logics continue to operate in new concepts in IR, such as ‘rogue’ or ‘failed states’, ‘new’ or ‘small wars’ and in ‘new technologies of war, of which drones and counterinsurgency campaigns are perhaps the most prominent examples’ (Anievas et al. 2014: 10). IR scholar Errol Henderson (2013: 71) takes to task the two main paradigms of IR, realism and liberalism, and makes the argument that they ‘are oriented by racist – primarily, white supremacist – precepts that inhere within their foundational construct, namely, anarchy’. Henderson (2013: 85–86) notes that this supposedly neutral ahistorical universal concept does depend on the primitivization of non-European societies. Put differently, the idea of anarchy does not come out of nowhere, out of a theoretical vacuum. Rather, Henderson demonstrates that thinkers such as John Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes and Kant (see Gani 2017) consistently summon up images of the ‘primitive’ societies existing outside Europe to refer to ‘anarchy’. According to these accounts, such societies function, by their estimation, in a state of nature, and hence outside the ‘civilized’ order of things. W.E.B. Du Bois brilliantly articulated in 1900 that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the global colour line’ (Du Bois 2007: xv). Henderson’s argument thus illustrates IR theory’s continued complicity in maintaining the global colour line, and thus in naturalizing racialized hierarchies. Du Bois’s famous articulation has been taken seriously by postcolonial IR scholarship. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to state that the retrieval of race as a central category in world politics

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has been one of the most significant contributions of postcolonial approaches to the discipline. Indeed, as Srdjan Vucetic and Randolph B. Persaud remark (2018: 51), ‘[i]deologies and practices of racial supremacy have been consistently present in International Relations’ in a variety of ways, whether in foreign policy, sanctions, immigration and refugee policies, the conduct of wars, state-­ building assistance or global capitalism (see, for instance, Sabaratnam 2017; Tilley and Shilliam 2018; Georgis and Gewarges 2019). The preoccupation with the centrality of race in IR has translated into valuable collective scholarly contributions over the last decade: aside from scholarly monographs and articles, there has been a plethora of edited volumes (Anievas et al. 2014; Persaud and Sajed 2018), international conferences organized around the theme of race in IR (Millennium’s established annual conference in 2016 had the theme of ‘Racialized Realities in World Politics’) and special issues dedicated to race in IR (Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2013, Millennium 2017, New Political Economy 2018). This preoccupation with the central role of colonialism and of race both to the making of our current international system and to the very foundations of the discipline of IR speaks to an ever-­ enduring concern of postcolonial IR, namely epistemic justice. Epistemic justice means that the knowledges produced outside the West should be given authoritative space to speak about their world, and also about the world in general. The idea of epistemic justice has thus entailed a twofold focus: exposing the hegemony of Western knowledge and perspectives to studies of international politics, and recentring non-Western voices and perspectives in analyses of world politics. Robbie Shilliam (2011: 1) remarks, for instance, how post 9/11 a variety of scholars within IR have obsessively focused on the effects of this momentous landmark on the West alone while leaving out any considerations of non-Western debates around ideas of war and conflict. He notes that the latter have been happening for some time in Islamic jurisprudence, for example, yet they have been sidelined. In that vein, ‘[w]hy is it that the non-Western world has been a defining presence for IR scholarship and yet said scholarship has consistently balked at placing non-Western thought at the heart of its debates?’ (Shilliam 2011: 2). At the core of this question lies the following: while the non-­ West has had an enduring presence in IR (as ‘backward’ ‘primitive’ spaces, spaces warred on, bombed, assaulted militarily and economically, subjected to structural adjustment programmes and development agendas), while the non-West has consistently been defined and treated as an object to be probed and studied by the Western expert/scholar, non-Western perspectives, voices and histories have been consistently ignored, marginalized and trivialized. The idea of epistemic justice therefore highlights not only the deeply problematic representation of non-West non-Western spaces (Said’s Orientalism should be required reading), but also the absence of the latter’s voices and knowledges from any meaningful engagements with international relations. Siba Grovogui’s (2006) work, for instance, excavates a different kind of narrative for post-Second World War international relations and international institutions, from the perspective of Africa and Africans. Grovogui examines the theoretical and political activities of several noted Pan-Africanists around the French proposal, in 1944, for the creation of a French Union between France and its African colonies. These political figures seized this opportunity to request reform in the colonies, and actively sought to pursue alternative visions of community and morality on behalf of African peoples.

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Box 4.1 Border Imperialism and the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis – A Postcolonial Perspective A postcolonial perspective is crucial in illuminating the long historical roots of transnational displacements by focusing on (1) the role of colonialism in transforming and destroying local economies, social fabrics and political structures; and (2) the continuities between colonial racial hierarchies and contemporary practices/discourses of racialization of migrants/refugees from former colonial societies. Very few scholars of migration take colonialism seriously as a backdrop for this global phenomenon despite the attention given to contemporary flows of migrants and refugees (for notable exceptions to this oversight, see Walia 2013; Mayblin 2017; El-Enany 2020). The spotlight on the Mediterranean refugee crisis links the two elements, and explains the continued dehumanization of African refugees and migrants. In May 2018, a European ambassador stated that ‘Niger is now the southern border of Europe’ (Buxton and Akkerman 2018). This may sound like an odd statement given that sovereignty understood as non-interference has been a norm enshrined within the international legal system for so long. The statement was made in the context of the recent efforts by the EU to control migration flows from Africa. In 2017, Vijay Prashad discussed the new initiative spearheaded by France and funded by the EU, entitled the G5 Sahel initiative. This aims to militarize and securitize parts of Africa from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to the southern rim of the Sahara Desert in a bid to prevent African migrants from reaching the Mediterranean. This initiative is part of an EU strategy called ‘border externalization’, which effectively seeks to relocate the EU’s border outside the EU.  In an effort to prevent would-be migrants from reaching its borders, the EU has signed a number of border control agreements with more than thirty-­ five neighbouring countries (Buxton and Akkerman 2018). These agreements involve commitments from signatory countries towards deportation of would-be migrants, the introduction of new biometric measures and numerous arms deals (in a bid to securitize zones seen as paths of migration and refugee flows), among others. The echoes of old colonial ideas (keeping uncivilized ‘barbarians’ away from Europe) is not lost on many analysts and activists. Vijay Prashad (2017) makes an even

more powerful and pointed analysis of these recent policies and initiatives by reminding the reader of the very roots and causes of this tragedy: “Refugees do not show up in the Mediterranean Sea as if from nowhere. By the time they get into their flimsy boats on the Libyan coastline, they have lived many, many dangerous lives. They have left their increasingly unproductive fields in western and eastern Africa, fled wars in the Horn of Africa, in Sudan and in places as far as Afghanistan, and travelled great distances to get to what they see as the final leg of their journey. What they want is to make it to Europe, which – since the early days of colonialism  – has broadcast itself as the land of milk and honey. Old colonial ideas and the wealth of Europe built from colonial labour beckon”. The ‘unproductive fields’ to which Prashad refers are, of course, the consequences of two centuries of devastating colonial economic policies that expropriated land, restructured local economies around cash crops and plantations, and depleted natural resources for the benefit of the colonial metropole (Césaire 2000; Wolf 2010; Rodney 2012). As Guyanese intellectual and political activist Walter Rodney (2012) notes, Europe’s colonial rule underdeveloped Africa. Rodney’s study has been hugely influential since its publication in 1972. His study reminds us that contemporary economic, political and social dilemmas and difficulties in African societies are a direct consequence of ruthless colonial domination and exploitation. Kwame Nkrumah introduced the notion of neocolonialism in 1965 to refer precisely to the continuation of colonial exploitation in Africa in the postcolonial/post-independence era. While colonial rule had nominally/formally ended, many African societies continued to be kept in a relation of economic dependency with the former colonial metropole. This dependency was created via terms of trade that benefited primarily the former colonizer, and via structural adjustment programmes that have devastated the continent for decades after independence. Crucial here is Egyptian economist Samir Amin’s (1976, 2018) work that explored in depth the economic and political relations of dependency between the (metropolitan) core and (colonial) periphery (see also Chapter 6): he argued that these global relations of exploitation and

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dependency are driving capital from the South to the North, and migratory flows of labour follow the same path. When Vijay Prashad states that ‘[r]efugees do not show up in the Mediterranean Sea as if from nowhere’, there is a larger context that needs to be kept in our field of vision. This includes the structural devastation of local economies in Africa as a direct result of two centuries of colonial rule; disastrous post-independence interference (both political and economic) by former colonial powers and powerful international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; and the subsequent militarization of the movement of people from Africa northwards to the Mediterranean, movement that is the consequence of all the factors mentioned here. It is important to note that local factors are not discounted in the push for migration, nor should they be, but such factors would simply make no sense outside the weight of regional/global structures that bears down on them (see Sajed and Inayatullah 2016). As a number of scholars have indicated, the EU’s migratory policy has translated into financially bolstering authoritarian regimes and dictatorships throughout Africa in exchange for cooperation on security measures regarding migration flows. For instance, the statistics provided by Nick Buxton and Marc Akkerman (2018) are sobering: of the thirty-five nations involved in border security arrangements with the EU, 48 per cent have an authoritarian government and 51 per cent have a ‘low human development,’ while over 122 billion euros has been poured into arms exports to these countries, even though 20

per cent of them are under EU and/or UN arms embargoes. Such staggering facts suggest that local environments and factors cannot be extricated from the larger structural conditions in which they are embedded. In a context where thousands of people die every year trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe, two activist lawyers have sued the EU at the International Criminal Court. The 245page document they put together states that the EU’s policies are in fact crimes against humanity, as the EU and its member states consciously sacrifice migrants’ lives in the belief that this will deter others from making similar attempts. The Mediterranean Sea is currently seen as the deadliest border in the world. This is no exaggeration. It is worth noting that not only do coast guards refuse to save migrants drowning at sea, but also that search and rescue NGOs have been criminalized for their efforts at saving them at sea while in distress (Gordon 2019). Europe (and generally the West) plundered African societies during two centuries of brutal colonial rule, and continued its economic and political domination and exploitation in the postindependence era. The thousands of Africans moving outside their homelands in search of safety and better living conditions have been treated as undesirable consequences of these policies. In such a context, appeals to responsibility and a shared humanity have been suspended and ignored as our television screens present news of yet another capsized boat in the Mediterranean.

Postcolonialism and Its Critics/Critiques The notion of epistemic justice, namely the recentring of non-Western voices, histories and perspectives, presents both opportunities and challenges for postcolonialism. Postcolonial IR has raised critiques of other critical approaches in the discipline (especially post-structuralism and feminism), flagging issues such as the dangers of ‘add and stir’ tendencies and the need for more nuanced readings of gender and feminisms. However, it has also had to grapple with critiques brought against its own omissions coming from indigenous perspectives and from Marxist approaches. The idea of bringing non-Western voices into the discipline of IR seems like a worthwhile enterprise, but there are a number of problems arising here. One major objection is that if we accept the premise advanced by postcolonial IR scholars that IR is a colonial discipline (and thus its racist/colonial origins have not yet been openly acknowledged and engaged), can we merely add non-Western perspectives (see Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Muppidi 2012)? Would this ‘add and stir’ approach really challenge the premises and foundations of the discipline (see, for instance,

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Ling 2015), or would their inclusion simply add to the diversity, but leave the discipline unchanged and unchallenged? Is it sufficient, for example, to add Chinese or Islamic perspectives on sovereignty and anarchy without questioning the very role of these concepts in keeping intact the rigid methodological and epistemological boundaries of the discipline? This easy inclusion that overlooks the enduring Western-centric character of the discipline and its colonial and racist origins can be compared to efforts by liberal multiculturalism. The latter merely adds non-White faces to an imagined diversity without doing the significant and difficult work of dismantling institutional/ structural violence and racism (Vitalis 2005, 2017). Inspired by feminist women of colour scholars (Mohanty 1984; Spivak 1988; Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000), postcolonial feminists in IR have echoed the above-mentioned concerns regarding quick inclusions of diversity that lack the substance of meaningful engagement and/or sociopolitical transformation. Noteworthy here is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal impact on postcolonial feminism both beyond and within IR. Her classic essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ argued that the Indian woman subject is doubly silenced by local patriarchy and by colonial imperialism (Spivak 1988). Responding to assumptions made by Western feminist scholarship around the prioritization of gender, postcolonial feminists in IR emphasize the necessity for taking seriously not only gender dynamics, but also their constant intersections with race, class and sexuality, and their location within general global phenomena such as colonialism, imperialism and capitalism (see AkbariDibavar 2018; Salem 2018; Rao 2020). In contrast, postcolonial approaches have received their share of critiques primarily from Indigenous scholars. The latter indicate that one of the major omissions from postcolonial scholarship has been the issue of Indigenous voices, and thus the larger issue of settler-colonialism (Wolfe 1999; Coulthard 2014; Estes 2019). Postcolonial analyses generally focus on colonial contexts in which struggles for national liberation bring about an independent postcolonial state. However, this does not explain the experience of Indigenous communities in North America or other British settler societies such as New Zealand and Australia (King 2018). In that sense, what makes settler colonialism specific is its logic of elimination: land and territory become the ultimate goal of conquest, and thus require the elimination of Indigenous peoples either violently or via assimilation (Wolfe 1999; King 2018: 138). Moreover, settler colonialism also implies an ongoing colonial situation that is unresolved and, to a certain extent, intractable. While there have been important interventions in postcolonial IR on settler colonialism and Indigenous perspectives, they are merely the beginning of a long road towards a more systematic conceptualization of settler colonialism in IR (Shaw 2002; Beier 2005; Lightfoot 2016). In that sense, because postcolonial IR lacks a robust engagement with settler colonialism, it has yet to engage substantially with cases of settler colonialism both past and present (such as South Africa under apartheid, Palestine and West Papua). Outside IR, a number of Marxist scholars have provided meaningful critiques of postcolonial approaches (see, for instance, Ahmad 1994; Dirlik 1998; Chibber 2013). They have indicated that postcolonialism’s turn towards post-structuralist/postmodern approaches has evacuated a much-­ needed materialism from analyses of colonialism and the postcolonial predicaments that have followed. Marxist critics note, for instance, that the influence of post-structuralist theory on postcolonial approaches (see, for instance, Spivak 1999; Bhabha 2004) has prompted postcolonial analyses to remain located within literary studies and thus almost exclusively preoccupied with textual analysis at the expense of crucial engagements with political economy of colonial/postcolonial processes. It should be noted, however, that Spivak identifies as a Marxist scholar, but her Marxist analysis is supplemented by a central focus on representation and identity formation.

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However, within IR, the Marxist critique of postcolonial approaches has been less sustained and systematic, though of course there are important contributions that should be included (see, for instance, Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015). There are also Marxist scholars in IR who have provided critiques of postcolonial theory. Such critiques have been raised against Postcolonial Theory writ large, though, and not specifically against postcolonial approaches in IR – although there are a few exceptions (see, for instance, Matin 2013). Another point worth bearing in mind is that while postcolonial studies as an academic field initially found a home in English/Comparative Literature departments, it quickly transformed into a set of approaches and perspectives that disseminated throughout various fields in Humanities and Social Sciences. Therefore, while postcolonial approaches remain widely used in literary analyses, they have also adapted to various disciplinary/interdisciplinary paradigms, and have also been influenced by Marxist/historical materialist or Gramscian perspectives, among others (Blaney and Inayatullah 2010; Salem 2020; Tilley 2020). On that note, it should be highlighted here that postcolonial analyses have brought their own criticisms of Marxist approaches with regard to the latter’s inattention to race and racial hierarchies. It is important to remember, however, that the Black Radical Tradition (Beckford 1972; Robinson 1983; Jones 2011) has done this materialist work of linking race and capitalism better and earlier than postcolonial theories, and has yet to be properly engaged by the latter.

Concluding Remarks Our global system is in the midst of an environmental (climate change), economic and political upheaval, all of which have played no small part in the current (beginning in 2020) global health pandemic. Paying attention to the ways in which predatory capitalist/neoliberal processes have devastated local societies and environments via processes of colonial conquest and postcolonial exploitation has become more urgent than ever. Postcolonial perspectives illuminate a complex historical reality about how processes of capitalist expansion were intimately shaped by racial hierarchies. Indeed, racism and racialization have been foundational to the twin processes of colonial conquest and capitalist expansion, not only via the slave trade and enslavement of entire populations, but also through an institutionalization (both global and national) of racism. Indeed, as a number of scholars have compellingly argued (see Mehta 1999; Hobson 2012; Losurdo 2014), liberalism, the core ideological foundation on which Western democracies have been established, has – from its very inception – played a central role in illiberal processes such as slavery, colonialism, genocide and imperialism. As I write these concluding remarks, the USA is being convulsed by nationwide uprisings in protest at the murder of George Floyd in the custody of the police (the latest in an incredibly long list of killings of unarmed Black Americans by the police). The uprisings have brought to the fore deep-rooted and well-developed campaigns around abolition (such as Black Lives Matter, BLM). Notable here is the globalization of the BLM movement  – which reflects an emerging transnational mobilization around issues of racial injustice and continuing colonial relations (especially affecting Indigenous communities). Postcolonial perspectives provide us with an opportunity to understand not only the deep roots of such processes into the colonial past, but also their enduring continuity  – with devastating reverberations  – into contemporary international relations.

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Glossary Terms Decolonization: A long-term process of removing colonial occupation and administration (via national liberation, anticolonial struggles) and grappling with the cultural, intellectual, psychoaffective and social effects of colonial domination. In that sense, anticolonialism constituted the initial political and intellectual impulse of resisting and overthrowing colonial rule and is thus clearly situated in a historical timeframe. Decolonization, on the other hand, has been an ongoing (and unfinished) process of wrestling with past and current consequences and legacies of colonialism.

Neocolonialism: The continuation of colonial domination and exploitation via economic and cultural means (thus military conquest and occupation is no longer seen as necessary). The purpose of neocolonialism is to force the integration of local/national economies into the global capitalist economy. The term was used by Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah (1965) to indicate the continued subservience of former colonial societies to powerful capitalist interests.

Orientalism: A system of representation of the East/Orient by the West according to a set of stereotypes that frame the former as inherently irrational, backward, steeped in tradition, despotic and feminine, whereas the latter is projected as rational, civilized, modern, democratic and masculine. Said (1979) states that Orientalism is a system through which the West projects authority over the Orient in order to control it.

Postcolonial feminism: A form of feminist criticism highlighting that issues pertaining to gender and sexuality cannot be examined without paying attention to their location within racial and class (socio-economic status) hierarchies. It also points to how mainstream feminism takes white Western middle-/upper-class women’s experience as the reference point for a universal experience of women. This critical approach seeks to provide a necessary corrective by focusing on the classed and raced experiences of women of colour from within and beyond the Western world.

Further Reading Fanon, F. (2004 [1961]) Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press). Persaud, R.B. and Sajed, A. (eds.) (2018) Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations. Postcolonial Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge). Prashad, V. (2007) The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press). Rutazibwa, O.U. and Shilliam, R. (eds.) (2018) Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (Oxon) London and New York: Routledge. Said, E. (1979) Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books).

THE ENGLISH SCHOOL

ANDREW LINKLATER AND ANDRÉ SARAMAGO

5

The English School is a term that was coined in the 1970s to describe a group of predominantly British, or British-inspired, writers for whom ‘international society’ is the primary object of analysis (Jones 1981; Linklater and Suganami 2006). Its most influential early members include Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, John Vincent and Adam Watson, whose main publications appeared between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s (see Bull 1977; Wight 1977, 1991; Watson 1982; Bull and Watson 1984; Vincent 1986; Butterfield and Wight 2019). Tim Dunne, Nicholas Wheeler, Barry Buzan and Andrew Hurrell have been among the most influential members of the English School in recent years (Dunne 1998; Wheeler 2000; Buzan 2001, 2003, 2004, 2014a; Hurrell 2007b; Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017). The English School remains one of the most important approaches to international politics, although its influence is probably greater in Britain than in most other societies where International Relations is taught. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the English School, and this is followed by a description of some tensions between leading exponents in the post-bipolar era that further reveal the distinctiveness of the perspective. The remainder of the chapter explains central concepts and lines of argument in six sections. The first focuses on the idea of order and society in foundational English School texts. This is followed by a discussion of distinctive debates in the English School. The third section shows how that discussion relates to the core concepts of international system, international society and world society. The chapter then considers English School analyses of the relative importance of order and justice in the traditional European society of states and discusses the expansion of international society and the role of the ‘standard of civilization’ in this context. The fifth section discusses the ‘revolt against the West’, the analysis of regional international societies and the emergence of the first universal society of states in which demands for justice have been more frequently heard. The sixth section returns to the question of English School reflections on the limited progress that has occurred in international relations, focusing the discussion on recent work on the possibility of a ‘global civilizing process’ in the context of ‘post-Western’ international society.

A Brief Overview The foundational claim of the English School is that sovereign states form a society, but an anarchical one since they do not submit to a higher monopoly of power that can force them to comply with global rules. That world politics have developed to constitute an international society of

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formally sovereign states that now encompasses the whole planet is regarded as one of its most fascinating dimensions. Global international society has achieved, it is argued, a very high level of order, and surprisingly little direct inter-state violence, in the absence of a higher coercive authority. Readers are invited to reflect on the probable level of violence, fear, insecurity and distrust in even the most stable of domestic societies should sovereign authority collapse. A condition of fear and chaos would most likely ensue, but that is not the defining feature of international relations. This is not to suggest that the English School underestimates the importance of force and power in relations between states. Its members regard violence as an endemic feature of the ‘anarchical society’ – the title of Hedley Bull’s most famous work (Bull 1977) – but they add that international institutions, law and morality restrain it to a significant extent. That power and force play a central role in the English School, in ways that make some of its members seem realist at times, is particularly apparent in Wight’s essay, ‘Why is There no International Theory?’ (1966: 33), which contended that domestic politics is the sphere of the good life whereas international politics is the realm of security and survival. Realist convictions are also evident in his observation that international relations are ‘incompatible with progressivist theory’. In a statement that seems to place him squarely in the realist camp, Wight (1966: 26) maintained that the 16th-century thinker Sir Thomas More would have recognized the basic features of world politics in the 1960s since so much had remained constant over the centuries. Some have contended that the English School is a British variant on state-centric realism that underestimates how far appeals to defend international society simply protect the interests of the dominant powers (for a critical discussion, see Wheeler and Dunne 1996). In fact, as is discussed later in more detail, the debate over the possibility of progress in world politics cuts through the English School, as different authors identify predominantly with solidarist or pluralist arguments. While the former admit the existence of progress in world politics, namely via the historical reconceptualization of institutions such as sovereignty in ways that legitimize, for example, humanitarian interventions (Vincent 1986; Wheeler 2000; Clark 2013), the latter consider any such developments problematic and at risk of disturbing the order and peace achievements of international society (Bull 1977; Jackson 1991, 2000; Mayall 2000). English School analysts are thus attracted by elements of both realism and idealism/liberalism. But what distinguishes them from other thinkers is the tendency to gravitate towards the middle ground, never wholly reconciling themselves to either point of view. In an influential series of lectures delivered at the London School of Economics in the 1950s, Wight (1991) described what he called the ‘rationalist’ or ‘Grotian tradition’ in those terms. The variety of terms can be confusing here, but suffice it to add that English School thinking is usually regarded as a modern twist on older patterns of thought (see Jeffery 2006 for a critique of the notion of a Grotian tradition). Wight cited Grotius’s statement in his magnum opus De Jure Belli ac Pacis, first published in 1625, that those who believe that anything goes in war are as deluded as those who think that force is never justified. On that argument, Grotius envisaged an international society in which violence between Catholic and Protestant states was replaced by a condition of relatively amicable coexistence. Wight argued that the rationalist tradition to which Grotius belonged was the ‘via media’ or middle way between the two other traditions of realism and ‘revolutionism’ – a category in which Wight placed a wide range of perspectives he considered ‘utopian’, from Kantian cosmopolitanism to Marxist socialism  – which holds that world peace is realizable, if not imminent (also Wight 1966: 91). In the lectures, Wight lamented the way in which the tensions between the realism and idealism or utopianism in the inter-war years had obscured the existence of a third tradition that focused on international society (see Buzan 2001).

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In short, the English School (which, as the following section explains, is best regarded as a diverse grouping of scholars rather than a homogeneous community) maintains that the international system is more orderly and civil than realists and neo-realists suggest. But since violence is probably ineradicable in their view, they are critical of ‘utopians’ who believe that a condition of perpetual peace can be realized. There is no expectation, they maintain, that the international political system will ever enjoy a level of cooperation that is comparable with what exists in stable national societies. If there is more to international politics than realists suggest, there will always be less than the idealist or cosmopolitan desires. Key Concept: International Society International society expresses the contention that classical realism and neo-realism are mistaken about inter-state dynamics in the context of anarchy. True, there is no higher monopoly of power that can compel states to observe principles of coexistence. But even in the anarchic condition, states agree on, and largely comply with, global norms including international legal arrangements, diplo-

matic protocols and so forth that testify to the existence of an international society. That is not to underestimate the importance of struggles for power and indeed for hegemony but to insist rather that competition and conflict between states are far from lawless but regulated and constrained to a significant degree by the institutions and norms that bind them together in an ‘anarchic society’.

Distinctive Debates in the Post-Bipolar Era As discussed in due course, the idea of the ‘via media’ can be explored further by considering three main concepts informing English School analysis, respectively international system, international society and world society. They capture the points of contrast between realism and ‘revolutionism’ in a way that explains the idea that the English School offers a limited progressivist account of world politics. Reflecting on the recent history of international thought, Wight’s protégé, Hedley Bull, argued that both realism and idealism contain valuable insights, but neither recognized that the international system is far from a state of war despite the fact that states possess a monopoly of the instruments of violence. Common interests in restraining force have led states to develop the art of diplomatic accommodation and a set of institutions – such as diplomacy, sovereignty, balance of power and international law – that make compromise possible, create some basic shared principles and settle expectations regarding the constitution of international society. Success on that front undermined what he described as the ‘domestic analogy’  – the belief that order between states could only be established by building, as world government thinkers supposed, the same institutions that uphold order within stable sovereign territories (Suganami 1989). While recognizing the merits of realist observations about the dangers inherent in international anarchy, English School scholars are thus far more prepared to analyse arguments for global reform that led to the universal culture of human rights and, more recently, to some support for humanitarian intervention and to radical innovations in international criminal law (see Wheeler 2000; Hurrell 2007b; Linklater 2016a). English School analysts also maintain that debates about the merits of humanitarian intervention or about the role human rights should play in domestic and international politics reveal much about the clashing conceptions that states have about the main institutions and values that should define international society. The scholarly division, among English School authors, between

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pluralist and solidarist positions in part reproduces such divisions between states. Many Western societies tended, in the aftermath of the bipolar era, to favour reconceptualizing sovereignty to emphasize the ‘responsibility to protect’, in such a way as to legitimize international humanitarian intervention and state-building operations in cases of mass atrocities and state failure (Bellamy 2013; Cater and Malone 2016). Other societies, including China, Russia and South East Asian states, have not shared the former enthusiasm of some Western powers for military intervention to protect human rights. These states have opposed what they regard as self-serving and dangerous Western interference, understanding it as a possible precursor of a reestablishment of Western influence in postcolonial societies in which the former imperial powers resume the attempt to reshape the world in their image (Bain 2003; Jackson 2000; Bickerton et al. 2007; Ziegler 2016). Such fears were intensified by the neo-conservative experiment by the Bush administration at the beginning of the 21st century and specifically by the flawed intervention to secure regime change in Iraq. They are also part of a wider ‘revolt against the West’, with its origins in the anti-colonial movement (Bull 1984b), that now sees several states emphasizing the sacrosanct nature of sovereignty and non-­intervention, effectively seeking to create regional international societies that resist perceived Western predominance over global international society (Quayle 2014; Buzan and Zhang 2014). If postcolonial states are troubled by decisions to undermine sovereignty, it is because memories of struggles to free themselves from the Western imperial powers remain vivid, and because they believe that a ‘new imperialism’ will further entrench global inequalities of power and status and establish a new ‘standard of civilization’ that attributes different sovereign rights to states according to their approximation to a Western-defined conception of the ‘good society’ (Mayall 2000; Bowden 2014; Buzan 2014b; Keene 2014; Zhang 2014; Linklater 2016). English School analysts regard such divisions, which are anchored in differences of culture, power and ideology, as central features of international society in its ‘post-European’ or ‘post-Western’ phase (Acharya and Buzan 2019). Significantly, members of the School disagreed among themselves about whether the time was ripe to embed new principles of humanitarian intervention into international society or whether such aspirations will create unnecessary rivalries that damage what they regard as the only arrangement that has the capacity to preserve order between states with different levels of military power and diverse cultures. To rephrase those points, members of the English School insist that the survival of that fragile society can never be taken for granted. It can be undermined by realist struggles for power and by anti-status quo or expansionist powers that thought, as in the case of Napoleon’s France or Nazi Germany, that they could only realize their objectives by using force. But international society can also be undermined by breaches of international law and by failures to use diplomacy to reach global agreements that respect diverse outlooks and orientations. English School theorists maintain that there is no guarantee that the modern society of states will survive indefinitely; it is therefore essential to understand its foundations and to ask how it can be strengthened. This does not rule out support for ‘utopian’ aspirations. Observing that demands for morality and justice have always influenced international relations, Wight (1977: 192) argued that ‘the fundamental political task at all times [is] to provide order, or security, from which law, justice and prosperity may afterwards develop’. But that comment rested on the assumption that justice would not benefit from a politics that underestimated the difficulties of preserving international order – that had to be in place before ‘higher’ aspirations could be promoted. In the age of superpower rivalries that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, English School writers reflected the prevailing

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diplomatic realities by emphasizing the priority of maintaining order and stability. In the mid1980s, Vincent argued that global support for the right to be free from starvation could at one and the same time promote justice and strengthen international society. In the post-bipolar era, Dunne and Wheeler argued for a more explicitly normative English School stance on human rights and humanitarian intervention. They defended a ‘critical international society’ approach that considered ways in which states could act as ‘good international citizens’ to promote cosmopolitan values (Wheeler and Dunne 1996; Dunne 1998). But as already noted, others within the English School have been critical of their belief that international society had reached the point where new efforts to secure justice for individuals could be added to the traditional emphasis on creating and preserving order between states. Such tensions have been core elements of Western responses to the ‘humanitarian challenge’ posed by ‘failed states’ over approximately the last three decades. English School writings have long maintained that international society largely depends on how far the great powers are ‘great responsibles’ that are restrained in the pursuit of self-interest and willing to use their influence to promote global values of the kind that Vincent, Dunne and Wheeler have defended. Underlying that standpoint is the belief that it is the great powers that usually pose the greatest threat to international society (Wight 1991: 130). How far they accept ‘special responsibilities’ is critical to the maintenance of that society and the key to the legitimacy of its fundamental institutions (Clark and Reus-Smit 2007; Clark 2011; Bukovansky et al. 2012). The recent phase of American hegemony – and the conduct of the ‘war against terror’ in particular – led English School analysts to return to the question of whether the survival of international society ultimately rests on the balance of power. Dunne (2003) foregrounded that question in his discussion of the Bush doctrine of ‘preventive war’ against hostile regimes that were believed to be willing to share weapons of mass destruction with terrorist groups. Such discussions reveal how great powers rewrite the rules of international society to suit their interests – or, as in the case of the US position on the International Criminal Court, refuse to be restrained by what they see as unnecessary obligations and entanglements (Ralph 2007). Other English School writers have explored new lines of investigation into the extent to which great power hegemony can be a basic ‘institution’ of international society – as was the case in the ancient Greek city-states system (Wight 1977: ch. 1) – or whether it is possible to contain hegemony by channelling it towards the responsible use of power as a form of legitimation (Clark 2005, 2007, 2009a). The issue arose in conjunction with the recent ‘unipolar moment’; it may assume even greater importance if China’s rise to power continues (Buzan 2018a). Indeed, one would expect proponents of an approach that is positioned between the poles of realism and utopianism to continue to develop distinctive debates about the prospects for improving international society and about the main obstacles that stand in the way. Key Concept: International System International system refers to what realism and neo-realism, in particular, regard as the dominant mode of inter-state relations throughout history – that is to a condition where states pursue power and security with little regard for international or global norms and institutions. The concept describes a condition in which states must take account of each other’s foreign policy aims and in which order may arise from precarious and tem-

porary balances of military power. Members of the English School privilege the existence of an international society but they do not ignore such systemic forces. For those reasons they claim to absorb the realist perspective in a more subtle and comprehensive analysis of world politics, which includes among other things the revolutionary transition from a European to a global international society.

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 ower, Order and Humanity: Core Concepts P in the English School We have seen that English School analyses begin with the surprisingly high level of order that exists between independent political communities in the condition of anarchy. Some, such as Wight (1977: 43), were intrigued by the small number of international societies that have existed in human history and by their short lifespans, all previous examples having been destroyed by empire after four or five centuries. Wight (1977: 35–39) also noted the propensity for internal schism in the form of international revolutions that brought transnational forces and ideologies rather than sovereign states into conflict. Wight’s (1991) understanding of the ‘three traditions’ of realism, rationalism and revolutionism frames the English School’s distinction of the different dimensions/ perspectives of world politics as, respectively, international system, international society and world society (Little 1995; Buzan 2001). The ‘international system perspective’ highlights the role of power and anarchy in inter-state relations. It is the predominant perspective in realist approaches and refers to circumstances where no common norms/institutions frame inter-societal relations. While the realist approach takes that to be the dominant state of affairs in world politics, English School authors emphasize that only very rarely have human societies interacted with each other in the total absence of collective norms/institutions. Even in those instances when naked power was dominant, such as that of European encounters with non-Western societies during the 19th century, some common norms/ institutions quickly emerged to regulate those relationships, albeit reflecting the dominant power relations (Schulz 2014). The ‘international society perspective’, on the other hand and as already discussed, emphasizes how states institutionalize their relationships, interests and identities in sets of norms, rules and institutions that frame their relationships and define what is considered legitimate behaviour in world politics. That is the perspective privileged by English School claims that international order can exist even in the absence of a global monopoly of power. As noted by Bull (1977 [2002]: 9–13), while a ‘system of states (or international system) is formed when two or more states have sufficient contact between them, and have sufficient impact on one another’s decisions to cause them to behave – at least in some measure – as parts of a whole’, a society of states can be said to exist ‘when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’. That important distinction underpinned Bull’s efforts to provide a more detailed account of how international societies develop. The ‘world society perspective’, introduced by Vincent (1986) and developed by Buzan (2004), includes the activity of non-state actors ranging from human individuals, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations, criminal associations and religious associations to movements claiming to represent humanity as a whole such as environmental groups or political movements such as socialism, liberalism or cosmopolitanism. Those actors, either purposively or not, act to undermine, surpass or at least transform inter-state international society (Buzan 2001). That was the least-theorized perspective in the English School in its early formulations. Buzan (2004, 2018a) attempted to develop the perspective by stating that the concept encompasses three

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understandings of world society. First, ‘normative world society’, in which ‘world society’ refers to humanity as a whole and has essentially an ethical function of appealing to the interests of the whole species – conceived as an abstract actor with no real institutional expression – when assessing inter-state international society (Clark 2007; McKeil 2018). In this context, Buzan (2018a: 128) emphasized that normative world society should not be understood as referring only to those conceptions of humankind that see it as a homogeneous, monolithic historical agent; crucially, it captures those pluralist conceptions that emphasize how a variety of civilizations and cultures are an essential expression of common humanity. Second, the idea of ‘political world society’, in which ‘world society’ refers to non-state actors with an institutional expression and capable of interacting with the society of states and influencing its norms, institutions, values and identities has been analysed by Clark (2007) and Pella (2013). Frequently, those actors, especially in the case of NGOs and activist groups, can be understood as mediating between normative world society and international society. Third, Buzan (2018a: 130) identifies ‘integrated world society’ as an ideal-­ type aggregate concept that captures the complex interrelationship between states, non-state actors and different expressions of the idea of humanity. As Buzan (2018a: 130) notes, ‘integrated world society is partly an abstract, ideal-type model and partly a predictive teleology based on observed trends in global governance’. It is also understood as a ‘normative approach’ aiming to place human rights and the rights of non-state organizations ‘on par with state’s rights’, thereby contesting the idea that ‘state sovereignty constitutes the overriding foundation of order in the affairs of humankind’ (Buzan 2018a: 130). Key Concept: World Society World society refers to the notion that the study of international politics is not exhausted by analysing the constitution of the society of states. Also important is the role that non-state actors play in shaping international society, its institutions and the prevailing notions of legitimacy. The concept represents an attempt to broaden the investigation of ‘anarchical society’ by considering a variety of non-state actors such as NGOs, multinational cor-

porations, social movements, criminal organizations and even individuals who have shaped international society. Recent English School analysts have examined the interdependencies between international society and world society, and they have investigated to a greater degree than their predecessors the regional international societies that exist in the Middle East and in South East Asia.

Discussions on the relationship between the international system, international society and world society perspectives are central to the English School. Although he did not use those terms, Wight (1977: 33) posed the question of whether it was commerce that first brought different societies into contact, and created the context in which a society of states could develop (1977: 33). In his remarks about the three international societies about which most is known (the Ancient Chinese, the Graeco-Roman and the modern society of states), he maintained (1977: 33–35) that each had emerged in a region that possessed a high level of linguistic and cultural unity. Independent political communities felt they belonged to a superior civilization. A sense of their ‘cultural differentiation’ from allegedly semi-civilized and barbaric peoples facilitated communication between them, and made it easier to define the rights and duties that bound them together in an exclusive international society. They did not believe that ‘uncivilized’ peoples had the same rights. In the case of the classical European society of states, the commitment to sovereign equality as a principle

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of ‘civilized’ international relations coexisted with assumptions about the right to use force to colonize those who were regarded as social inferiors and to conquer and displace indigenous peoples (Keal 2003). Writing on the evolution of modern international society, Hedley Bull (1977 [2002]: 82) observed that in ‘the form of the doctrine of natural law, ideas of human justice historically preceded the development of ideas of interstate or international justice and provided perhaps the principal intellectual foundations upon which these latter ideas at first rested’. Those words appear to echo Wight’s position that some sense of cultural unity is essential before an international society can develop. But Bull’s position was different because he argued that a society of states can exist in the absence of linguistic, cultural or religious solidarities. A pragmatic need to coexist was all that was needed to give rise to what Bull (1977 [2002]: 316) called a ‘diplomatic culture’ – a web of conventions and institutions that preserves order between states that are divided by culture and ideology. He added that a diplomatic culture is likely to be stronger if it is anchored in an ‘international political culture’ – it is more likely to flourish if states share the same general way of life and have similar beliefs. Illustrating the point, Bull and Watson (1984) argued that in the 19th century, the European society of states rested on an international political culture. However, with the expansion of that society to embrace the non-European regions of the world, first as subaltern colonies and later as postcolonial sovereign states, the sense of being part of a common civilization declined. Even so, the decolonization process also saw some of the basic rules and institutions of the international order that first developed in Europe, such as the notion of sovereign equality or the principle of non-intervention, adopted by the overwhelming majority of its former colonies (partly as a way to legally protect themselves against European neo-imperial impulses), so giving rise to the first universal society of formally equally sovereign states (Linklater 2016a: chs. 10 and 11). No common political culture currently underpins international society other than a very thin, and frequently contested, adherence to common values of sovereign equality. However, as is discussed below, this condition might change if different elites across the world come to identify with what Bull (1977 [2002]: 316–317) called an emergent ‘cosmopolitan culture’ of modernity. According to Bull (1977 [2002]: 53–55), all societies  – domestic and international  – have arrangements for protecting three ‘primary goals’. These are placing restraints on violence, upholding property rights and ensuring that contracts and agreements are kept. The fact that those primary goals are common to domestic and international society explains Bull’s rejection of ‘the domestic analogy’, which, it will be recalled, is the idea that a peaceful international order will only come into being when states surrender their powers to centralized institutions similar to those at the national level (Suganami 1989). As we have seen, English School writers break with realism because they believe that states can enjoy the benefits of society without transferring sovereign prerogatives to a higher authority. Bull’s approach was that states are usually committed to limiting the use of force, to ensuring respect for property and to preserving trust in their relations with one another. Those shared interests, rather than any common culture or shared way of life, are the ultimate foundation of international society. As members of that society, sovereign nation-states have similar commitments to protect primary goals, but the inter-state order is distinctive because of its ‘anarchical’ nature. Societies of states exist because most political communities want to constrain the use of force and to bring a measure of civility to their external relations as a condition for the protection of their primary

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goals. Hence, English School writers argue that international society can be multidenominational, and include states that have radically different cultures and philosophies of government. Indeed, one of the central aims of diplomacy is to promote mutual understanding and to find the common ground between very different cultures that often fail to comprehend each other’s intentions (Buzan 2010; Reus-Smit 2018: ch. 3). The crucial issue here is how far the ‘inside’ affects the ‘outside’ – how far domestic beliefs contribute to the development of international order. Wight’s essay on international legitimacy showed how the principles of international society that included the rules of admission and right conduct changed as the dynastic system of government was replaced by the idea that sovereignty resides in the people or nation (Wight 1977; see also Clark 2005). He added that ‘these principles of legitimacy mark the region of approximation between international and domestic politics. They are principles that prevail (or are at least proclaimed) within a majority of the states that form international society, as well as in the relations between them’ (Wight 1977: 153, emphasis in original). From that perspective, it is unsurprising that certain regimes have tried to force others to comply with their vision of the good society. Examples include competing forces in the religious wars of the 17th century, the French revolutionary wars, Bolshevik efforts to export socialism and recent attempts by Western states to export liberal democracy via peace-building and state-­building operations (Koivisto and Dunne 2010). English School thinkers have been unconvinced by those who think that the members of the society of states must subscribe to exactly the same political ideology (Wight 1991: 41–42). They have strongly advised against efforts to impose one set of values on others when the real challenge is how to build international society in the midst of cultural diversity. But they recognize that such hegemonic endeavours have surfaced many times in the history of the modern society of states and provide evidence of profound struggles over the nature of that society – over its rightful members, organizing principles and future direction. That emphasis makes the English School a natural ally of more recent constructivist analysis (see Chapter 11) of principles of legitimacy and global norms in international affairs (Edelman 1990; Philpott 2001; Clark and Reus-Smit 2007). However, English School analysis has been distinguished by its long-standing investigation into the ‘normative’ and ‘institutional’ factors that give international society its distinctive ‘logic’ and identity (Bull and Watson 1984: 9). The increasingly multicultural and multi-religious character of world society only serves to underline the value of its approach to understanding the complex interplay between domestic ideologies, social and political forces and the changing configuration of international society.

 rder, Justice and the ‘Standard of Civilization’ O in International Society English School writers have been interested in the processes that transform systems of states into societies of states and in the norms and institutions that prevent the collapse of civility by placing constraints on military power. They have been concerned with how far the modern society of states can establish mechanisms for ensuring justice for individuals in their own right. We have seen that Bull distinguished between international societies and international systems, but in order to understand the tensions between order and justice in world affairs, he introduced the important distinction, already mentioned, between the ‘pluralist’ and the ‘solidarist’ (or ‘Grotian’) conceptions of

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international society, which has been a major influence on the English School in the intervening decades (Bull 1966). The ‘central Grotian assumption’, Bull (1966: 72) maintained, ‘is that of the solidarity, or potential solidarity, of the states comprising international society, with respect to the enforcement of the law’. That standpoint was apparent in the conviction that there is a clear difference between just and unjust wars, and in the parallel assumption ‘from which [the] right of humanitarian intervention is derived … that individual human beings are subjects of international law and members of international society in their own right’ (Bull 1966: 84). The contrasting pluralist approach, as expounded by the 18th-century international lawyer Emmeric de Vattel, contended that ‘states do not exhibit solidarity of this kind, but are capable of agreeing only for certain minimum purposes which fall short of that of the enforcement of the law’ (Bull 1966: 72). From that standpoint, order between states is more likely to exist if they recognize that they have different conceptions of justice and diverse and often antithetical understandings of what counts as a just war. A related argument was that the basic members of international society are states rather than individuals. Moreover, as sovereign equals, they can have no legitimate interest in matters that fall within each other’s domestic jurisdiction and no right of intervention to protect individuals (Bull 1966). Having made that distinction, Bull asked whether there was any evidence for the view that international society was developing in a more solidarist direction. The answer in Bull (1977 [2002]: ch. 4) was that expectations of greater solidarity were premature. How far that is correct became a major bone of contention in more recent disputes between pluralists such as Jackson (2000) and solidarists such as Wheeler (2000). To understand Bull’s reasoning, it is necessary to recall his discussion of primary goals in international society (Bull 1977 [2002]: 16–18, ch. 4). Bull argued that the interest in preserving the balance of power has often clashed with the notion of the equal sovereignty of states. On three separate occasions in the 18th century, Polish independence was sacrificed for the sake of equilibrium between the great powers. In the 1930s, the League of Nations decided not to defend Abyssinia from Italian aggression because Britain and France needed Italy’s support to balance Nazi Germany. In such cases, order took priority over principles of justice directed towards the well-being of human populations or the sovereign equality of states. There were many such examples of the tension between order and justice in the bipolar era. Order and stability demanded that the superpowers prevent nuclear proliferation, but justice suggested that all states – and not just the great powers – had a right to self-determination and to the conduct of an autonomous foreign policy, as well as the right to acquire weaponry that they regard as central to their defence (Bull 1977 [2002]: 227–228). Moreover, the value that was attached to order between the superpowers meant that justice for individuals – in the form of protecting human rights – had low priority. The dominant assumption was that international society would be weakened if each superpower attempted to export its particular conception of justice on its members. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and its key Western allies were free to promote the human rights culture and to attempt to export liberal democracy and ‘market civilization’ (Hobson 2004; Bowden and Seabrooke 2007; Stivachtis 2010). They did so in the belief that global support for a certain vision of liberal democracy is critical for global governance. But that conviction has often been linked with the ‘revolutionist’ supposition that the members of international society should have similar political systems and ideological perspectives (Clark 2009a; Dunne 2010).

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In this context, it has been argued that developments in international society since the end of the Cold War entail the reinstatement of the ‘standard of civilization’ (Donnelly 1998; Fidler 2000; Stivachtis 2008). Originally, the ‘standard of civilization’ was developed by international lawyers in the latter part of the 19th century when the European powers had acquired economic, political and military powers over non-European societies, particularly as a result of their rapid industrialization. In this period, the European imperial powers not only ruled a significant portion of the rest of humanity but also claimed an exclusive right to decide when any of their colonies (or semi-colonized societies such as China) had reached the level of social and political development that was required to gain admission into the society of states. They asserted monopoly control over the meaning of the ‘civilized’ advances that had to occur before non-European societies would be eligible for consideration as members of international society. A well-ordered, ‘civilized’, society was understood as one that emulated Western conceptions of statehood, the rule of law, property rights and diplomatic practice as well as equally ‘modern’ forms of productive technology and industry. The ‘standard of civilization’ thus ‘supported a partly racist taxonomy of “savage, barbarian and civilised” as a way of classifying non-European societies in relation to Europe, and gate-­ keeping entry to European, and later Western, international society’ (Buzan 2014a). It acted as a key institution in a European-dominated exclusionary international society, but it would also pave the way for its future expansion by declaring that non-European powers could in principle achieve membership by imitating their ‘civilized’ superiors (Bull and Watson 1984; Bowden and Seabrooke 2007; Watson 2009). It simultaneously legitimized the Western colonial enterprise over those societies deemed ‘uncivilized’ because they did not conform to the Western conception of a well-­ ordered society, thereby needing Western guidance to be elevated to a ‘civilized’ condition. It also established the criteria that non-European societies had to satisfy before they could be recognized as civilized members of the family of nations (Gong 1984; Bowden 2009; Zhang 2014). Viewed from a broader historical perspective, some version of a ‘standard of civilization’ underpinned the earlier regional international societies that existed in ancient Greece and China (see Wight 1977: ch. 1). They had also created standards for distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms of social and political organization and between acceptable and unacceptable forms of behaviour, not least with respect to the conduct of war (Linklater 2010, 2016a; Buzan 2014a). For example, traditional China defined itself as the ‘Middle Kingdom’, which deserved tribute from societies at a ‘lower stage’ of cultural development. No less committed to a hegemonial view of international order, the European powers believed that societies that failed to meet their ‘standard of civilization’ should be barred from international society (Gong 1984). However, the emergence of the first universal international society raises the question of how far a ‘global standard of civilization’ is possible – one that does not simply reflect the interests and values of the most powerful states but represents the different points of view of the larger membership of international society and, increasingly, images of social organization and standards of behaviour that are deemed essential for the preservation of human – but not only human – life on the planet (Linklater 2016a: ch. 11) The issue is that, given unprecedentedly complex levels of global interdependencies, a viable postcolonial global international society cannot simply be organized around the ‘civilized’ standards of the powerful, but must be the result of more ‘global’ compromises between radically diverse cultural points of view. Profound questions therefore arise about the prospects for progress in world politics and, specifically, about the possibilities of

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balancing the classical focus on order and more recent demands for justice in the post-Western, global international society of states (Acharya 2019). Many scholars have argued that powerful liberal-democratic states remain committed to a global ‘standard of civilization’ based on ‘Western values’ such as human rights, democratic government and free market relations (see Linklater 2021: ch. 6). But those values are deeply contested if not rejected outright as foundations for a ‘civilized’ international society. In this context, it is worth recalling that Bull argued that Western liberals needed to be more cognisant of the fact that their conception of human rights did not automatically appeal to all non-Western peoples. As in the case of contemporary China, many groups believe it is more important to preserve political stability and ensure economic growth rather than promote Western-style democracies. The point was that liberals had to appreciate that tensions over the meaning of such rights were unavoidable in a multicultural society of states; liberals and non-liberals alike had to try to understand other cultural perspectives rather than dismiss them as manifestations of less rational ways of life (see Bull 1979a). Such tolerance of diversity was crucial for the survival of international society – and never more so than in the post-Western society of states. But as Bull (1977) and other members of the English School have argued, although states should endeavour to promote global justice as well as international order whenever circumstances allow, progress may prove to be frustratingly slow and can be thrown into reverse (Buzan 2004; Linklater 2011b, 2016a: ch. 11; Clark 2013). The development of English School thinking about human rights is fascinating in this regard. Bull (1977 [2002]: 83) argued that pluralism has had the upper hand over solidarism in the history of modern international society. Prior to the 20th century, the solidarist belief in the primacy of individual human rights clung on, but ‘underground’ as if states had entered into ‘a conspiracy of silence … about the rights and duties of their respective citizens’ (1977 [2002]: 83). As noted earlier, many states that have thrown off imperial rule in recent decades fear that human rights law will be used as a pretext for great power interference in their internal affairs. However, support for solidarist measures to promote the global protection of human rights appears to have increased in the recent period (Bull 1984a; Wheeler 2000; Gonzalez-Pelaez and Buzan 2003; Buzan 2004, 2014a; Linklater 2011a). The most significant example is general acceptance of the global humanitarian principle that sovereign governments have a ‘responsibility to protect’ their citizens (Bellamy 2008; Evans 2008; Bellamy and Luck 2019; Welsh 2019). But the level of agreement is limited. There is no consensus – and little prospect of one – about the conditions in which national sovereignty can be overridden to protect human rights. States are not poised to agree that the constitution of international society should be amended to accommodate the principle of humanitarian intervention. Suffice it to add that divisions within the English School have echoed those differences. Dunne and Wheeler (1999) argued that the end of bipolarity made it possible for the aspiring ‘good international citizen’ to intervene where there is a ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’ even though the states involved might breach existing international law. Jackson (1991: 291ff) stressed the danger that intervention might create great power rivalries that weakened international order. If it was necessary to choose between them, preserving restraints on the use of force should take priority over ‘humanitarian’ wars. Still valuable is the observation by Bull (1977 [2002]: 91) that successful efforts to promote global justice depend on a broad consensus that change will strengthen international society and contribute to rather than weaken inter-state order. Crucially, they are dependent on the backing of

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the great powers with their unique capacities to promote or frustrate global cooperation. It is hard to tell whether Bull believed that the expansion of international society to include the West’s former colonies would lead to greater solidarism or demonstrate that hopes for global political progress are still ‘premature’ (see Mayall 1996; Wheeler 2000). He was perhaps equivocal on this point. The emergence of an elite ‘cosmopolitan culture’ of modernity was encouraging (Bull 1977 [2002]: 305). However, that culture was heavily ‘weighted in favour of the dominant cultures of the West’ (Bull 1977 [2002]: 305). More seriously, and here the rise of ‘religious fundamentalism’ immediately comes to mind, there was clear evidence that various groups were drifting further apart. It was important to remember, Bull (1984a) argued, that when Third World groups first issued demands for justice, they did so as ‘supplicants’ in a world dominated by the Western powers, where it was vital to use Western terms in order to elicit a sympathetic response. But the revival of indigenous cultures and the emergence of new elites in non-Western societies set new processes in motion. Many groups placed ‘new interpretations’ on ‘Western values’, and some dispensed with them entirely, thereby raising large questions about whether many of the demands issuing from non-Western groups were ‘compatible with the moral ideas of the West’ (Bull 1984a; Acharya 2011). Pursuing the theme, Jackson (2000: 181) argued that the diverse nature of international society in the postcolonial era has made support for the pluralist image all the more essential. He contended that pluralism is the best arrangement that societies have devised thus far for reconciling the demand for political independence with the desire for order (see also Nardin 1983; Weinert 2011). It is worth noting to conclude this part of the discussion that Watson (1987: 152) maintained that Bull and he ‘inclined [towards the] optimistic view’ that modern states are ‘consciously working out, for the first time, a set of transcultural values and ethical standards’. The growth of the human rights culture to include the ‘responsibility to protect’ and recent developments in international criminal law support that view, as do the growing concerns about the preservation of non-­ human nature in the context of global climate change and ecological degradation (Falkner and Buzan 2017; Falkner 2019). It is important to remember that societies are still in an early phase of dealing with the economic, environmental and traditional security challenges that have accompanied unprecedented levels of global interconnectedness (Linklater 2010). Whether they can make further progress in such domains depends in part on how far the great powers demonstrate the requisite ‘moral vision’ in their foreign policy (Bull 1983: 127–131; Clark 2009a, 2011; see also Aslam 2013; Loke 2015; Shunji and Buzan 2016). But, crucially, with the rise of world society, much depends on how far international non-governmental organizations and social movements can influence public opinion and government action with respect to such challenges as climate change or the ‘climate emergency’. Much depends on how the interrelations between international society and world society will lead to greater support for new principles of international legitimacy that surpass traditional preoccupations with order rather than justice (Buzan 2004; Clark 2005, 2007, 2013; Mitrani 2013). The fate of the principle of ‘global environment stewardship’ as discussed in recent English School deliberations deserves high priority in future investigations (Falkner and Buzan 2017; see also Hurrell 1994, 2007b). Of particular interest is how far different societies will agree on ‘transcultural values’ pertaining to a genuinely universal, ecological standard of civilization (Box 5.1).

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Box 5.1 Environmental Stewardship and the Institutions of International Society Robert Falkner and Barry Buzan (2017) deploy the English School to study how environmental stewardship has become one of the primary institutions of international society, increasingly shaping expectations about what is considered legitimate state behaviour. With reference to the concepts of international society and world society, they note how, at least since the 19th century with the conservationist movement in North America and Europe, non-state actors have sought to coordinate their activities transnationally with a view to persuading states to adopt both national and international measures of environmental protection. Predominantly confined to an educated elite, the conservationist movement achieved mainly national influence  – for example, with the creation of national parks  – and had little international expression. This changed following the Second World War, and in particular with the ‘environmental revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of post-war prosperity, the emergence of ‘post-material’ values and growing scientific knowledge about the Earth system – itself developed in the context of the Cold War alongside fears of a ‘nuclear winter’ – environmental concerns became a fundamental part of a mass grassroots-­based movement. The movement quickly found expression at the level of inter-state relations, starting with the Stockholm UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 that proclaimed the protection and improvement of the human environment was the responsibility of all national governments.

Falkner and Buzan argue that since that period the interaction between world society – in the form of the environmental movement headed by various NGOs – and the society of states gave rise to environmental stewardship as an important criterion for assessing the legitimacy of state behaviour. At the same time that states became increasingly expected to show restraint and environmental awareness in their management of wildlife areas in their territories, expectations regarding the duty of environmental stewardship also became intertwined with pre-existing concerns and institutions of inter-state society. Crucially, ‘developing’ or industrializing states exhibited concerns that environmental stewardship might be promoted by more powerful states in ways that compromised the institution of sovereignty, the sovereign use of natural resources and their right to development. This has led to the shaping of environmental stewardship as an institution that seeks a compromise between global environmental protection and the clash of sovereign states’ interests; a compromise that hitherto has found expression in the development of principles such as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘common but shared responsibilities’ (see Bukovansky et al. 2012). The English School is thus presented as a particularly incisive approach to analyse how the interdependent interactions between the several actors of world politics shape, in frequently unplanned ways, the development of the normative framework of international society.

The Revolt Against the West One of the original features of English School investigation is the analysis of the globalization of an international society of states that was until quite recently confined to self-defining civilized peoples (for a recent reassessment of traditional accounts, see Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017). The impact of the ‘revolt against the West’ on the first universal society of states was a central theme in Bull and Watson’s pioneering writings in the 1980s. The question was whether the diverse civilizations that had been brought together by Europe’s overseas conquests have a common desire to belong to an international society as opposed to an international system. They maintained that it was necessary to recall that the world of the late 18th century had been dominated by four regional international orders (the Chinese, European, Indian and Islamic). Most ‘governments in each group had a sense of being part of a common civilization’ that was superior to all others (Bull and Watson 1984: 87). European states were committed to the principle of sovereign equality within their continent but refused to extend such rights to non-Europeans. How Europeans should behave towards colonized peoples was always a matter of dispute. Some claimed the right to

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enslave or exterminate them, while others defended their entitlement to humane (but not necessarily equal treatment) in the age of imperialism (Muthu 2003; Phillips 2011). With the expansion of Europe, other peoples were forced to comply with its conception of world politics and its ‘standard of civilization’. With decolonization, most of those societies came to accept most of the institutions and practices that were integral to European international society (such as sovereignty, non-interference and diplomacy), while at the same time seeking to adapt them to postcolonial realities (Devetak et al. 2016). They came to enjoy formally equal membership of that society after a long battle to weaken Europe’s confidence in its moral and political superiority, to erode its belief in its right to determine their fate and to contest the notion that the European societies were the only true examples of a ‘civilized’ way of life (Aydin 2006). Bull (Bull and Watson 1984: 220–224) called this process ‘the revolt against the West’. He divided it into five elements. The first was ‘the struggle for equal sovereignty’ undertaken by societies such as China and Japan that ‘retained their formal independence’ in the colonial period but were governed by unequal treaties ‘concluded under duress’. As a result of the principle of ‘extra-­ territoriality’, they were denied the right to settle any disputes involving foreigners according to domestic law (see Suzuki 2005). Following the legal revolt against the West, Japan joined the society of states in 1900, Turkey in 1923, Egypt in 1936 and China in 1943. A parallel development was the political revolt against the West in which the colonies demanded freedom from imperial domination. The racial revolt, which included the struggle to abolish slavery and the slave trade as well as all forms of white supremacism, was the third dimension. A fourth was the economic revolt against the structures of inequality and exploitation that have been at the heart of the Western-dominated global commercial and financial system. The fifth revolt, the cultural revolt, was a protest against cultural imperialism, including the West’s assumption that it was entitled to decide how other peoples should live, as expressed in political projects to globalize liberal-­ individualistic conceptions of human rights (Acharya 2016). For Bull and Watson (1984), an inevitable question was whether the expansion of international society would lead to new forms of disharmony, if not conflict, or would witness the development of innovative collective standards of behaviour that facilitated peaceful coexistence between the former colonial powers and the newly independent colonies. Realist assumptions about the inevitability of conflict between societies and about the need to be prepared to use force against radical challenges to core security interests emphasized the danger of the first outcome (see Huntington 1996). That standpoint can be contrasted with English School orientations towards increasing cultural diversification that stressed the imperative of understanding the reasons for the revolt against the West and reconstructing international society so that it was more responsive to the needs of ‘post-colonial’ peoples. Bull recognized the scale of the challenge by stressing the differences between the cultural and other dimensions of that revolt. He maintained that in the case of the first four dimensions of the revolt against the West, ‘Third World’ governments attempted to persuade the former colonial powers to take their own moral and political principles seriously in relations with non-European peoples. They did not formally contest Western norms, whereas the cultural revolt did overtly reject core Western values, raising the question for Bull (1977: 305) of how ‘non-Western’ values could be incorporated into an international society that was ‘genuinely universal’. Reflections on those dimensions of world politics have developed in new directions since Bull made those comments, and principally as a result of the rise of postcolonial perspectives and the

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related critique of Eurocentrism in International Relations (see Chapter 5; also Hobson 2004, 2009, 2012). Postcolonial thinkers have argued that international society remains suffused with distinctions between ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ peoples that go back to the imperial era. They criticize a tendency in the English School to regard the society of states as the custodian of ‘neutral’ principles of coexistence, and they question whether it can secure the advances in global justice that Bull and others have called for (Seth 2011). Postcolonial writings more generally stress the need for more sophisticated empirical analyses than can be found in the English School of the ways in which non-European societies and governments were influenced by, and incorporated within, the society of states and how many (such as Islamist movements) pose unique challenges not only to the expansion of international society but to the broader phenomenon of Western modernity (Pasha 2009, 2012, 2017). Where the continuing revolt against the West will lead, and what it will mean for the future of international society, will attract scholarly interest for years to come. An obvious issue is whether an agreement about the merits of the pluralist idea of international society is all that radically different cultures can accomplish, and all they should expect to achieve. Studies of the development of regional international societies within global international society appear to point in that direction (Hurrell 2007b; Karmazin et al. 2014). They have emphasized how different regions of the world constitute sub-global forms of international society with their own institutional dynamics and normative arrangements, notwithstanding their membership of, and place within, the larger international society. Initially, the European Union was analysed as an example of a distinctive regional international society with strong solidarist tendencies, given the extent to which supranational institutions influenced the domestic politics of its member states and the reality that principles of the free market, liberal democracy and human rights constituted a new ‘standard of civilization’ that was employed to assess the eligibility of post-Soviet societies for membership of the association (see Linsenmaier 2015; Stivachtis 2008; Stivachtis and Webber 2011; Weber 2011). Studies of other regional international societies in East, South East and Central Asia (Quayle 2014; Buzan and Zhang 2014; Pourchot and Stivachtis 2014), in the Middle East (Buzan and GonzalezPelaez 2009), Africa (Williams 2009) and in Latin America (Kacowicz 2005) have shown that a pluralist conception of international relations centred on the principles of sovereign equality and non-­intervention tends to dominate (Jones 2012). It is important to stress in concluding this section that the tensions between solidarist and pluralist tendencies in global international society were reinforced by the emergence of several new states since the 1990s as a result of the disintegration of several Third World societies and the fragmentation of the Soviet bloc. Unforeseen problems were created by ‘failed states’ such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Libya (Helman and Ratner 1992; Nuruzzaman 2011; Patrick 2011). Unexpected challenges have arisen because of gross violations of human rights in civil conflicts as in Syria, because of regimes that are in a state of war with sections of their own population, because of chaotic or troubled regions such as Somalia and Yemen that might provide a safe haven for terrorist organizations, and because of fears that the disintegration of nuclear powers (Pakistan has often been mentioned in this context) could deliver weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorist organizations. Old debates about Western intervention and about the legitimacy of foreign occupation have arisen in this context, creating tensions between the different conceptions of international society noted earlier (Roberts 1993; Hurrell 2007b). At this juncture, such disputes point to an international society in transition – unable to wholeheartedly embrace solidarism or

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certain to do so in the future but incapable of returning to the somewhat simpler reality of a world governed by pluralist principles and relatively disinterested in the protection of human rights (Mayall 2000; Hurrell 2002, 2006, 2007b; Williams 2005; Weinert 2011; Welsh 2011). But there can be no doubt that the Western powers no longer have a virtual monopoly of power in deciding how international society should respond to human rights violations, weapons proliferation, climate change, the management of global economic problems and so forth (Hurrell 2007b). The rise of new centres of power such as China, India and Brazil represents a new stage in the evolution of the society of states that was born in Europe and was – although this is changing – dominated by the West (Suzuki 2008, 2014; Buzan 2018a). With respect to the question of order and justice, on some accounts a new era of ‘post-colonial donors’ may be emerging in which development assistance does not depend on ‘civilizational hierarchies’ based on old distinctions between the ‘modern North’ and the ‘pre-modern South’; support for the pluralist conception of international society may check the temptation to echo the West in demanding that recipients follow the path taken by the allegedly most civilized peoples (Sohn 2011; Farooq et  al. 2019). But much will depend on how new centres of power resolve tensions between ‘developing country’ and ‘aspiring great power’ identities (Hurrell 2007b: 19).

Progress and Civilization in International Society As discussed earlier, several authors in the English School avoid realism’s pessimism about the possibility of progressive change in world politics. At the same time, the majority are also significantly more cautious than revolutionist aspirations about the possibilities of perpetual peace and global justice. The argument of this chapter is that the English School points to limited progress in the shape of agreements about how to maintain order and, to a lesser degree, about how to promote global justice. Bull’s writings often suggested that order is prior to justice, not least because states find it easier to agree on basic principles of coexistence. On those occasions, Bull seemed to be aligned with what Wight described as the ‘realist’ wing of rationalism, but elsewhere he was closer to its ‘idealist’ side (Wight 1991: 59). Towards the end of his life, Bull seemed more sympathetic to the solidarist point of view and stimulated important reflections on the prospects for internationalism and the significance of world society (see Dunne 1998: ch. 7; Buzan 2004; Linklater and Suganami 2006; Williams 2010). That shift was most pronounced in the Hagey Lectures delivered at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1983 (Bull 1984b). It was illustrated by the comment that ‘the idea of sovereign rights existing apart from the rules laid down by international society itself and enjoyed without qualification has to be rejected in principle’; that was because ‘the idea of the rights and duties of the individual person has come to have a place, albeit an insecure one’ within the society of states ‘and it is our responsibility to seek to extend it’ (Bull 1984b: 11–12). The ‘moral concern with welfare on a world scale’ was evidence of a ‘growth of … cosmopolitan moral awareness’ that represented ‘a major change in our sensibilities’ (1984b: 13). With the evolving global agenda, it was essential that states became the ‘local agents of a world common good’ (1984b: 14). Such ideas have lost none of their importance in a period in which international society has struggled to reach a consensus on how to deal with global environmental politics in the context of the climate emergency (Hurrell 1994, 2006, 2007b: ch. 9; Falkner and Buzan 2017; Falkner 2019).

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It would be erroneous to suggest that Bull came to think that solutions to global problems would be any easier to find, or that the point would soon be reached where states would no longer face ‘terrible choices’ (1984b: 14). Scepticism invariably blunted the visionary impulse. So much is evident from his observation that new, post-sovereign political institutions and loyalties might yet develop in Western Europe, but such a world would not be free from danger. Medieval international society, with its complex structure of overlapping jurisdictions and multiple loyalties, had been more violent than the modern states system (Bull 1977: 255, 267). Bull (1979b) therefore advanced a qualified defence of the society of states that emphasized that most states could play a more ‘positive role in world affairs’. Despite its numerous defects, international society was unlikely to be bettered by any other form of world political organization in the foreseeable future. Bull therefore argued that states can create an international system or an international society out of the condition of anarchy and, in more stable times, may be able to make small progress in building support for principles of justice. He stressed that nothing is pre-ordained here; everything depends on how peoples think of themselves as separate political communities, how they understand their rights against, and duties to, the rest of humanity, and how far they are prepared to use diplomacy, patiently and prudently, to discover common ground and to develop it further, where possible. That is why the English School has been especially interested in the legal and moral dimensions of world politics, why the ‘international society approach’ has much to offer the constructivist analyses of global norms (and vice versa) and why inquiries into international legitimacy have been among the most interesting ways of building bridges between the two perspectives (Edelman 1990; Clark 2005, 2007; Clark and Reus-Smit 2007). The traditional works of the English School shied away from visions of how humanity should be organized in accordance with principles of justice: there was a certain reluctance to engage with what has come to known as global ethics and international political theory (see, however, Vincent 1986). The same tendency has been evident in the most prominent English School writings of the last few years (Buzan 2004, 2014a). Bull spoke for many in the English School when he maintained that there was no reason to think that political philosophers will succeed where diplomats have repeatedly failed, namely in identifying moral principles that all or most societies can regard as the foundation for an improved international order. On the other hand, a basic humanism informed Bull’s argument that international order must be judged by what it contributes to the lives of individual people; it is also evident in the contention that, despite noble intentions, the advocates of humanitarian intervention may increase suffering that could have been avoided by the prudent reliance on the tried and tested conventions in international relations that may seem disappointing from a ‘utopian’ point of view (Jackson 2000; Bain 2003). A particular interest in what Dunne and Wheeler (1999) called ‘suffering humanity’ runs through English School approaches, whether pluralist or solidarist, whether broadly supportive of moving towards embedding a principle of humanitarian intervention in international society or robustly opposed to it, and whether keen to defend human rights or quick to stress the danger that cosmopolitan projects will become entangled in, and tainted by, familiar interstate struggles for power and prestige. In recent years, one line of inquiry into the possibility of progress in world politics has been undertaken by building bridges between the English School perspective (particularly Wight’s embryonic comparative study of societies of states) and Norbert Elias’s process sociology with its detailed study of how Europeans came to think of themselves as uniquely civilized (Linklater 2011a, 2016a). The investigation has shown how particular phenomena such as the ‘standard of

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civilization’ grew out of the process that Elias analysed. More specifically, it has discussed, echoing themes in Wight’s essays, that civilized peoples developed particular standards of restraint in their relations with each other that were repeatedly set aside in relations with savages or barbarians (for further discussion see Linklater 2021: chs. 3 and 4). Particular attention has been paid to the impact of the expansion of international society on the dominant social standards of restraint – on, for example, the cosmopolitan conviction that states should honour the ‘responsibility to protect’ the rights of their citizens. English School references to the ‘civilizing role’ of international society have been emphasized in the investigation of parallels with process sociology (see Linklater 2011a). In this context, the question is posed of how far societies can agree on a global civilizing process; more specifically, on how far the combined weight of international society and world society can lead to new standards of restraint with respect to the just and sustainable exploitation of nature. The aim of such an inquiry is to augment classical English School interpretations of the changing contours of international society by drawing on the resources of process sociology.

Conclusion In The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, E. H. Carr (2001: 12) argued that international theory should avoid the ‘sterility’ of realism and the ‘naivety’ of idealism. The English School can claim to have passed that test of an effective international theory. Its members have analysed elements of society and civility that have been of little interest to realists and neo-realists. Although they have been principally concerned with understanding international order, the English School has also considered the prospects for global justice. None of its members are persuaded by utopian or revolutionist arguments that maintain that states can settle their most basic differences about morality and justice. That is the key to the claim that the English School has been the via media between realism and revolutionism. The English School argues that international society is a precarious achievement whose survival is far from guaranteed, and it stresses that, without it, more radical political developments are unlikely to take place. It is to be expected that there will always be two sides to the English School: the more realist side that is quick to detect threats to international society and the more cosmopolitan side that identifies possibilities for making that society more responsive to the needs of weak and vulnerable peoples. The relationship between those different orientations will continue to evolve in response to changing historical circumstances. Of growing importance is the question of how new centres of power will transform international society in the ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-­ Western’ era. Whatever the future holds, the ideas of ‘system’, ‘society’, ‘world society’, ‘community’ and ‘civilization’ will remain important conceptual tools for understanding fundamental continuities and patterns of change in world politics.

Glossary International institutions: In English School analysis these are more than international organizations or global regimes. The concept highlights such phenomena as the idea of territorial sovereignty, diplomacy, the balance of power and even war when it has been used to check the aspirations

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of a hegemonic power such as Germany under National Socialism or France when governed by Louis XIV.

Pluralist international society: A condition in which states agree that basic principles such as respect for sovereign equality are the keystones of international order. From their perspective, member states are likely to undermine order by attempting to impose their rival moral positions on international society as a whole.

Revolt against the West: This refers to the ‘Third World’ anti-colonial struggle against Western imperial domination that led to the ‘expansion of international society’ – to the development of the first universal society of states in human history. English School analysts have argued that the ‘revolt’ continues in, for example, the reaction against Western conceptions of universal human rights and images of modernity.

Solidarist international society: A condition in which states are united in supporting global moral values (such as the notion of fundamental human rights or the ideal of global environmental stewardship) and also in believing that international society should protect them. Standard of civilization: A 19th-century European principle that set out the conditions that ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ peoples had to satisfy before they could be considered for membership of the international society of ‘civilized’ states. The concept was an integral part of European colonial attitudes. English School analysts have argued that the standard endures in the post-imperial society of states, for example in the human rights discourses and in exercises in democracy promotion.

Further Reading Bull, H. (1977 [2002]) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan). Buzan, B. (2014) An Introduction to the English School: The Societal Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press). Dunne, T. and Reus-Smit, C. (eds.) (2017) The Globalization of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hurrell, A. (2007) On Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Linklater, A. and Suganami, H. (2006) The English School of International Relations: A Contemporary Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Suganami, H., Carr, M. and Humphreys, A. (2017) The Anarchical Society at 40 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wheeler, N. (2000) Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

MARXISM

ANDREW LINKLATER AND ANDRÉ SARAMAGO

6

In the mid-1840s, Marx and Engels wrote that capitalist globalization was transforming the international states system. They believed that the global expansion of capitalism meant that, even though conflict and competition between nation-states had yet to come to an end, the main fault lines of the future would revolve around the divisions between the two dominant social classes, the national bourgeoisie in each country and an increasingly international proletariat with their interrelated domestic and international struggles. The outline of a new social order that realized the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity was already contained in the material conditions of the most advanced capitalist societies and could be seized and actualized by the revolutionary action of the most advanced political movements of the industrial working class. Through revolutionary action, the international proletariat would embed those ideals in a new form of global cooperation that would free all human beings from poverty, exploitation and oppression. Many traditional theorists of international relations have stressed the failings of Marxism or the ‘materialist conception of history’. Marxism has been the foil for realist arguments that international politics has long revolved around power struggles between independent political communities that will continue well into the future. In particular, Kenneth Waltz argued that Marxism was a ‘second-image’ account of international relations, which believed that the rise of socialist regimes would eliminate conflict between states. Its utopian aspirations were dashed by the way in which socialist regimes originating in revolutions all over the world were quickly enmeshed in struggles for power and security, which realists consider to be inherent in international anarchy – the subject of what Waltz (1959, 1979) called ‘third-image’ analysis. English School thinkers such as Martin Wight maintained that Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1968) might appear to be a study of international politics, but it was too preoccupied with the economic aspects of human affairs to be regarded as a serious contribution to the field (Wight 1966). The argument was that Marxists had underestimated the crucial importance of nationalism, the state, geopolitics and war, and the role of the balance of power, international law and diplomacy in world politics. Since the 1980s, new interpretations of Marxism have appeared that have questioned these previous understandings. The perspective has not only become an important weapon in the critique of realism but has also been characterized by many innovative attempts to harness its ideas to develop a more complex political economy approach to the study of international relations, where the aim is to understand the interplay between the states system, geopolitics and the global capitalist economy (see Cox 1981, 1983; Halliday 1994; Rosenberg 1994, 2013a, b,

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2017; Cox and Schechter 2002; Teschke 2003, 2014a; Bieler and Morton 2006, 2018a, b; van der Pijl 2007, 2010, 2014; Ayers 2008, 2012a, b; Gill 2008, 2010; Anievas 2010, 2015; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2015; Saull et al. 2015; Anievas and Matin 2016; Rosenberg and Boyle 2019). Mediated by the Frankfurt School, its impact on critical international theory has also been immense (see Chapter 8). For some, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalism marked the death of Marxism. But for a growing number of scholars, the relevance of Marxism has increased with the passing of bipolarity, its release from the shackles of orthodox Soviet Marxism and the accelerating effects of capitalist globalization (Gamble 1999; Bieler and Morton 2018a, b). Since Marx’s writings in the 1840s, the main strength of historical materialism has been its analysis of how capitalism has become the dominant system of production worldwide. The 2008 global financial crisis provided a salutary reminder of the power of global capital and the need for historical materialist explorations of the relationship between states and capitalism, or between government, society and the ‘financial aristocracy’. Concurrently, growing US unilateralism, coupled with the rise of non-Western powers, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), and the possibility of a multipolar world order, increased levels of interest in the perspective and its capacity to analyse the relationship between global capitalism and global geopolitics. Many Marxists conceded in the 1970s and 1980s that materialist approaches had paid insufficient attention to the nation-state and violence in the modern world. Since then, few have kept faith with Marx’s belief that the triumph of capitalism would be short-lived or subscribed to his belief that inexorable laws would lead to its destruction and replacement by Communism. But the combination of the global financial crisis, increasing geopolitical tensions and the emerging ecological crisis has borne out Marx’s contention that unregulated capitalism is prone to, and will undergo, crises that have major consequences for the conditions of existence of the human species as a whole. These crises have been accompanied by scholars, both within and outside IR, that have questioned previous assumptions about the limitations of Marxism. They have breathed new life into historical materialism in ways that are relevant to the study of international relations and may only increase its importance in the years ahead. Researchers who draw on the historical materialist perspective thereby continue to explore ways of reconstructing its approach to politics and history in order to explain structures and processes that are largely neglected by mainstream approaches to the field. Habermas’s (1979, ch. 4) call for the ‘reconstruction of historical materialism’, for preserving the strengths and cancelling the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship (Linklater 1990), still resonates today. It is impossible to discuss all the varieties of Marxism in a short chapter that surveys the significance of historical materialism for International Relations (see Joseph 2006; Anievas 2010 for a broad-ranging survey of Marxist perspectives). The approach taken here begins by describing the main features of the historical materialist conception of history in Marx and Engels’ work. This is followed by a brief discussion of the main theoretical innovations introduced by Marx and Engels and by explaining how international relations were discussed within that framework. The third section summarizes key themes in classical historical materialist theories of imperialism and dependency. The chapter concludes with a discussion of recent developments in historical materialist approaches to international relations, specifically neo-Gramscian approaches and the analysis of the uneven and combined development of global capitalism.

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The Historical Materialist Conception of History One of Marx and Engels’ ambitions was to provide an overview of the history of human development from the earliest phases of social existence to the contemporary era. Such a perspective was essential, on the one hand, to denaturalize the present, that is, to show how contemporary conditions of existence came to be what they are and how these have an historical origin rather than being a natural and immutable state of affairs. On the other hand, only via such a long-term perspective could a more adequate understanding of the patterns of social change be attained, which permitted a more realistic assessment of the possibilities for future social transformation. In this context, Marx and Engels proposed a ‘materialist conception of history’ that departs from human beings ‘as they are’, from the ‘study of the actual life-processes and the activity of the individuals of each epoch’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 176). This perspective starts from the fundamental conditions that make history possible, the most basic of all being the fact that people, ‘before everything else, need to eat, to drink, a habitation, clothing and many other things’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 181). The first historical act is ‘the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 188). A more adequate understanding of human development thus depends on the study of the inescapable relationship between embodied human beings and nonhuman external nature, through which the former labour upon the latter, transforming it in ways that produce the objects required for the satisfaction of their developing biological and social needs. This productive activity is not fixed in time, but is rather a constantly ongoing and ever-­ developing process, through which people develop what Marx and Engels call their ‘forces of production’ by learning more about external nature and how to better tame it and orientate its processes towards specifically human ends. Hence, human forces of production have an inherent developmental tendency, as people learn how to further extend their control over nature and, in the process, increase the means at their disposal for the satisfaction of their needs (Marx and Engels 2000a: 191). History thus involves an inescapable ‘unity’ and a constant ‘struggle’ with nature – a relationship that is intertwined with the development of people’s relations with each other in various ‘forms of social intercourse’. As Marx and Engels (2000a: 188) observe: This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production […] as the basis of all history; and to […] explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). Productive activity defines ‘the limits of the possible’ by circumscribing what is the maximum productive capacity of a society at any particularly historical juncture and drawing the boundary of the level to which that society is capable of satisfying its members’ historically developing needs (Pijl 2007: 7). Concomitantly, forms of social intercourse (also referred to as relations of production) define the forms of activity required by the members of a given society to ensure its material reproduction and find expression in the whole range of social institutions and ‘theoretical products’ – such as religion, philosophy and ethics – that orientate and legitimize the continued forms of engagement in productive activity within the existing ‘limits of the possible’ (Marx and Engels

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2000a: 188). Human conditions of existence at any particular historical juncture are thus the result of ‘a historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one another [that] is handed down to each generation from its predecessor’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 189); or what Marx and Engels call a ‘mode of production’ (see Glossary). These conditions are ‘modified by the new generation, but also prescribe for it its conditions of life and give it a definite development, a special character’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 189). The challenge in making history intelligible lies in developing an understanding of the predominant social dynamics that shape its development in particular directions (Marx and Engels 2000a: 189). To Marx and Engels, the movement of history is ‘dialectical’. This is exhibited in the fact that, at any historical juncture, a certain form of social intercourse, together with a corresponding stage of development of productive forces, constitutes the boundaries of ‘real life’, within which individuals exist and whose reproduction is ensured and legitimized by prevailing ‘morality, religion, metaphysics [and] all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 180). However, ‘active, real, conscious human beings’ are also constantly engaged in rationally stretching beyond their inherited limits of the possible, projecting in their minds new techniques and technologies of labour that expand their control over nature (Marx and Engels 2000a: 180). In the process, people constantly alter their inherited limits of the possible, developing new, and a greater proliferation of, products of their labour. These products, of course, imply not only the objects required for the satisfaction of human needs, but also leisure time in the form of the possibility of working less while producing more as a direct consequence of a rise in productivity, owing to the development of the forces of production via the adoption of new, more efficient and efficacious, technology. Consequently, people constantly establish the immanent conditions for the development of new forms of social intercourse; associated with which are new forms of distribution of the products of their labour. However, the actualization of that immanent potential depends on further rational stretching at the level of the ideas that orientate the establishment of new social institutions and norms that regulate productive activity and the distribution of its products. It is in this sense, then, that Marx argues that consciousness has no autonomous development, but it is also not a mere reflection of material circumstances. Consciousness mediates the development of both the forces of production and forms of social intercourse. It is human beings’ conscious ‘development of their material production and their material intercourse [that] alters, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 181). Of course, this process is inherently conflictual, as the establishment of new forms of social intercourse and associated changes in the distribution of the products of productive activity implies changes in power and status relations within and between societies. Hence, those social classes that benefited from the form of intercourse developed within the previous limits of the possible will resist the transformation and adaptation of that form to the new potential immanent in the development of the forces of production. Consequently, the same form of social intercourse that constituted the context for the development of the forces of production in the past eventually comes to constitute a barrier to their further development and the actualization of their immanent potentials. Hence, a predominant pattern of human historical development has been a succession of forms of social intercourse, as these dialectically constitute both the condition for the development of productive activity and eventually also a barrier to its further

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development. Throughout history, a long-term sequence of forms of social intercourse can be identified in which, in place of a ‘form of intercourse which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals, a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another’. (Marx and Engels 2000a: 197) The main historical manifestation of this dialectical movement is the historical confrontation between, on the one hand, those social classes whose position in the social intercourse permits them to own the means of production and enjoy a greater access to the products of productive activity, and who thus possess an active interest in the maintenance of the inherited state of affairs, and, on the other hand, those classes who do not control the means of production and have less access to the products of productive activity, and thus would benefit from a change in the predominant form of social intercourse. The transformation of the inherited social form can only occur when the classes interested in such a transformation are capable of carrying out a revolutionary overthrow of the ruling conservative classes. However, the success of such a revolutionary movement is always conditioned by the actual development of productive activity and the corresponding capacity of human beings to rationally stretch beyond their inherited limits of the possible and conceive of alternative ways to organize social intercourse that actualize the immanent potential gathered in the development of their forces of production. Human history has thus been a laborious struggle to satisfy basic material needs, to understand and tame nature, and to resist class domination and exploitation. In keeping with his materialist perspective, Marx understood history as a process full of contradictions and struggle in which human beings learned how to control non-human nature and forms of social intercourse in order to satisfy their ever-developing biological and social needs. This process was understood to have reached its apex in Western capitalist modernity, in which people had achieved unprecedented power over natural forces that had once been beyond their understanding and control, and thus radically expanded the limits of the possible. They had transformed their relationship with the physical environment with the result that they had created the technological potential for a more rational form of social intercourse that made possible a substantial reduction in both material scarcity and necessary labour time (Marx 1992: 158). But Marx’s dialectical understanding of human history highlighted the fundamentally tragic character of capitalism as a form of social intercourse. While capitalism creates the objective conditions for a radical advance in human freedom, it also denies its actualization, becoming a fetter on the further development of the human species. Although collective power over nature has increased to unprecedented levels, individuals have become trapped within the capitalist global division of labour, exposed to unregulated market forces and exploited by new forms of factory production that turn workers into ‘appendages to the machine’ (Marx 1992: 548; see also Dunayevskaya 2000: ch. 16; Foster 2000; Anderson and Rockwell 2012: ch. 3). Industrial capitalism thus became a form of social intercourse characterized by largely unchecked human exploitation, in which a transnational capitalist class controls and profits from the labour power of the subordinate global proletariat (Robinson and Harris 2000; Bieler et al. 2008; Hart-Landsberg 2013; Bieler and Morton 2018a, b). It has become the root cause of an alienating condition in which the human species – the bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat – is at the mercy of the global structures and forces it has created, but that escape its collective and democratic control. Crucially, the point is not only to describe those conditions with maximum detachment but also to understand the implications of that analysis for the actualization of

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the immanent potential for freedom within human history and within the capitalist stage of social development most specifically. Marx (2000b: 174) famously wrote that philosophers had interpreted the world; the point was to change it. An end to alienation, exploitation and estrangement remains the ideal that drives the attempt to understand the laws of capitalism and the overall movement of human history. Consequently, to Marx, the materialist conception of history is simultaneously an analysis of history and of the social forces that shape its development, namely the historical constitution of social hierarchies and inequalities, but also an orientating device regarding the immanent potential, gathered by the historical process itself, for human beings to transform their inherited forms of social intercourse in ways that expand freedom and the limits of the possible.

Class Struggles, Nature and International Relations Throughout history, the mass of humanity has had to surrender control of its labour power simply to survive, while those who own the means of production – feudal lords, slave owners, factory owners and so on – systematically exploit them. This division of labour has both been a condition for the overall development of human civilization under conditions of material scarcity and a source of constant class conflict in the form of slave revolts, peasant rebellions and working-class struggles in more recent times. Class struggles were, for Marx, the principal moving force of human history. Recent scholarship has emphasized how Marx’s conception of class struggles was multidimensional; class struggles assume different forms in different historical contexts (Losurdo 2016; Bieler and Morton 2018a, b: 45; Marx 2019). This idea would orientate Marx’s analysis – carried out not only in his theoretical work but also in his journalist writings and ethnographic notebooks – of the American Civil War and the Irish or Polish questions. In these writings, Marx frequently identified the emancipation of slaves in the American South or the national independence of Ireland and Poland as the pre-condition for the overall emancipation of the working class (Anderson 2010; Losurdo 2016). Hence, class struggles were regarded by Marx as relating in complex ways to race, national and anti-colonial emancipatory struggles. Key Concept: Class Struggles Class struggles, in a strict sense, refer to the historically circumscribed struggle for power within capitalist societies between the minority section of the population that owns and controls the means of production (bourgeoisie) and the majority of the

population that is obliged to sell its labour power to ensure its physical survival (proletariat). In a wider sense, class struggles can refer to a general theory of social conflict that seeks to capture the interweaving of its class, race and national dimensions.

In his reflections on capitalism, Marx argued that universal history came into being when the social relations of production and exchange became global and when more cosmopolitan tastes emerged, as illustrated by the desire to consume the products of distant societies and to enjoy an emergent ‘world literature’ (Marx and Engels 2000b: 249). But the forces that unified humanity also prevented the rise of universal solidarity by pitting members of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and by forcing members of the working class to compete for scarce employment. Historical materialists have thus criticized those perspectives on globalization that overlook the

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forms of power and inequality that are inherent in what should be the object of analysis – the process of uneven capitalist globalization (Rosenberg 2002, 2005; Lacher 2006: ch. 1; Gill 2008; Anievas 2014, 2015). Marx’s belief was that new forms of transnational solidarity between the exploited classes were emerging as part of the resistance to growing inequalities, and because of the disjuncture between the extraordinary wealth that capitalism produced and the poverty of individual lives. Transnational working-class solidarity was triggered by the remarkable way in which capitalist societies used the language of freedom and equality to justify their existence while systematically denying real freedom and equality to subordinate classes. Recent scholarship has sought to further develop these themes by inquiring into the limits and possibilities for transnational working-class solidarity under conditions of capitalist globalization (Bieler et al. 2008; Jakapovich 2011; Bieler 2012a, b; Ness 2015; Gill 2016; Scipes 2016). The fascination with globalization and its political effects has frequently been understood as involving a lack of recognition of the importance of relations between states in Marx’s thought. Although Marx did not develop a comprehensive theory of international relations that combined his analysis of political economy with an analysis of world politics, Marx and Engels – the latter having a keen interest in strategy and war – were perfectly aware of the role of geopolitics in human history. That much is evident in Marx’s journalistic writings, which were significantly concerned with topics of international politics, and also in his activity in the International Working Men’s Association (Anderson 2010). In the International’s inaugural address, Marx (2000a: 581), after commenting on the oppression of Poland by Russia and referring to the solidarity shown by the English working class with the abolitionist struggle in the American Civil War, observed that these events: … have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power, […] and to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations. The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes. Marx and Engels knew that war and conquest had forced social groups into ever-larger political associations and played a fundamental role in the dynamics of global capitalism and in the struggle for human emancipation but, as mentioned earlier, they did not incorporate these insights in their wider theoretical work. Their main goal at that level was to understand the role that capitalism had played in creating global social and political relations. Some of the most striking passages in Marx and Engels’ writings predicted the rising levels of human interconnectedness that have appeared particularly in recent decades. The essence of capitalism was to ‘strive to tear down every barrier to intercourse’, to ‘conquer the whole earth for its market’ and to annihilate the tyranny of distance by reducing ‘to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another’ (Marx 1973: 539). In a classic passage in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (2000b: 248–249) claimed that: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country […] All old-fashioned national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed […] In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for

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their satisfaction the products of different lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have [the] universal interdependence of nations ... The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production […] i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. This remarkably prescient statement had clear implications for revolutionary strategy. The sense of ‘nationality’ might already be ‘dead’ among the enlightened proletariat, but national bourgeoisies remained in control of state structures and used nationalism to dampen down class conflict. Marx and Engels believed that each proletariat would first have to settle scores with its own national bourgeoisie, but revolutionary struggle would be national only in form. The capture of state power was only the first stepping stone to realizing cosmopolitan ideals (2000a: 249). For that reason, some have referred to the ‘geopolitical deficiency’ in the foundational writings, and specifically to the failure to explain ‘why political power constitutes itself territorially in the shape of a world system of multiple sovereign states and how the dynamics between these political jurisdictions relate to the national and international reproduction of capitalism’ (Teschke 2010: 166; also Lacher 2006; Callinicos 2007; Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008; Anievas 2010; Teschke 2014b; Rolf 2015). Realists such as Waltz have argued that at the outbreak of the First World War, national proletariats realized they had more in common with their respective bourgeoisies than with each other. The realist argument was that no one with an understanding of nationalism, the state and war should have been remotely surprised, yet many socialists were astonished by the divisions between Europe’s working classes. For realists, the failure to anticipate that outcome demonstrates the central flaw in Marxism – its economic reductionism, as manifested in the belief that capitalism is the key to understanding the nature of the modern world (Waltz 1959). That is one of the most influential interpretations of Marxism in International Relations. There are four points to make about it. Marx and Engels were among the first thinkers to reflect on the new era of rapid economic and social globalization under capitalism and its implications for relations between different classes within and across state borders. They believed that class conflict within particular nation-states would trigger the decisive revolutions of the time, which would spread quickly, so they believed, from the region in which they first erupted to all other capitalist societies. It has been pointed out that the European perception of the relatively peaceful international system in the middle of the 19th century – ignoring colonial violence perpetrated by European empires – encouraged such beliefs. Theories of the state and war were replaced by theories of society and the economy (Gallie 1978). More than reflecting such a shift, Marx’s (1992) political thought was shaped by a materialist philosophy that led him to argue that relations between states were undoubtedly important but of ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ significance. These were considered phenomena that were conditioned by the productive activity and associated class struggles that shape human history and social existence. In a letter to Annenkov, Marx expressed such an understanding when asking whether ‘the whole organisation of nations, and all their international relations [is] anything else than the expression of a particular division of labour. And must not these change when the division of

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labour changes?’ (Marx 1966: 159). That is a question rather than an answer, and a rhetorical one perhaps. It might be regarded as evidence that realists have been correct to stress that historical materialism casts no light on international politics because of its economic reductionism. But on another level, Marx’s point is instructive. Relations between states have their own autonomy, or relative autonomy, but one cannot understand them in long-term perspective without taking account of larger patterns of change that include economic development and technological innovation. Such a reading is supported by Marx’s already mentioned analysis of international politics in his journalistic work and in his political activity with the International (Anderson 2010). Marx ultimately failed to produce a theoretical account able to capture the interplay between those phenomena across the generations. However, such an analysis of the interdependencies between modes of production, class struggles, state structures, geopolitics and the process of globalization also remains largely absent from mainstream approaches to international relations. As discussed in the following sections, it has fallen to Marxist-inspired approaches to develop that more comprehensive perspective. Second, Marx and Engels reconsidered their ideas about the impending demise of the nation in response to the power of nationalist sentiments during the 1848 revolutions. They wrote that the Irish and the Poles were the victims of national as well as class domination, and they added that freedom from national oppression was critical if a worldwide proletarian organization was to develop (Marx and Engels 1971; also Benner 1995; Anderson 2010; Losurdo 2016). Parallel to that discussion, they also took account of how the civil war in the USA unleashed a complex intertwinement of race, class and national struggles in which ‘Black slaves seeking freedom, Black and White northern soldiers, British workers and abolitionist socialist intellectuals expressed solidarity with each other across racial and national lines’ (Anderson 2017a: 28). While remaining convinced that national differences would probably decline and even disappear over the coming decades or centuries (Halliday 1999: 79), Marx and Engels were aware of the persistence of national animosities and of the role of national attachments in the complex forms that class struggles assumed both within states and across national borders (Losurdo 2016: ch. 2). The end of the long European peace that developed after the Napoleonic wars led to other adjustments to their position. Stressing the role of force throughout human history, Engels predicted unprecedented violence and suffering in the next major European war, and thought that military competition rather than capitalist crisis might be the spark that ignited the long-awaited proletarian revolution. Interestingly, Engels recognized that the possibility of major war meant that the socialist movement had to be seen to take matters of national security and the defence of the homeland seriously (Gallie 1978; also Carr 1953; Draper and Haberkern 2005; Blackledge 2019). Third, it is now amply recognized that far from embracing the Prometheanism that characterized orthodox Soviet Marxism, Marx and Engels’ critique of capitalism expressed a degree of ecological sensibility that continues to escape most mainstream approaches to the study of world politics (Foster 2000; Burkett 2014). Marx’s natural-scientific notebooks reveal the importance of ecological considerations in his thought and in the development of the critique of capitalism, leading one analyst to maintain that ‘it is not possible to comprehend the full scope of Marx’s critique of political economy if one ignores its ecological dimension’ (Saito 2017: 19). From his materialist conception of human/non-human nature metabolism as an inescapable feature of the human condition, Marx observed how capitalist relations of production at one and the same time created unprecedented levels of control over non-human nature and produced what he described as a deep

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‘metabolic rift’ that was evident in over-exploitation of resources, deforestation and massive pollution (Foster 2000: ch. 5). Expressive of this rift was the division that capitalism created between town and country with the development of large-scale industry and agriculture, which entailed the simultaneous exhaustion of nutrients from agricultural land and the accumulation of human waste in cities. This split fundamentally undermined the ‘exchange of matter between man and Nature; […] the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence’ (Marx 1992: ch. 7). The metabolic rift quickly became a global phenomenon, given how, in their constant quest for new markets, resources and cheap labour, European colonial empires exported the capitalist mode of agricultural production to their colonies, effectively robbing them of the ‘conditions of their fertility […] without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil’ (Marx, cited in Foster 2000: 164). Marx’s insights into the metabolic rift associated with capitalist production thus underlined the complex intertwining of ecology and world politics in ways that continue to escape mainstream approaches in International Relations, and might prove instructive in the further development of the discipline. Fourth, as already noted, Marx and Engels’ intriguing comments about the relationship between class, ecology, race, nationalism, the state and war were not developed into a comprehensive theory of international relations (Gallie 1978; Anderson 2010: ch. 6). That fact should be considered in conjunction with the complex history of the publication of Marx’s writings and, specifically, with the Soviet attempt to promote a simplistic and mechanistic understanding of historical materialism that failed to capture the nuances of its  – frequently unhelpful  – distinction between the economic base of society and its legal, political and ideological superstructure (Brincat 2014; Kilminster 2018). Too often, the state was regarded as little more than an instrument of the ruling class, although it was realized that in some circumstances it could acquire significant autonomy from the dominant class forces (Hobson 2010). Marx and Engels’ political writings revealed greater subtlety than the summations of historical materialism ever did. Recent historical materialist scholarship has sought to develop the insights in Marx and Engels’ work that open the way for a comprehensive theory of international relations. The strength of such an approach, according to its proponents, is that it permits overcoming what Bieler and Morton (2018a) call the ‘dualist framing’ that characterizes most other approaches in International Relations. A ‘dualist framing’ entails the assumption that social reality is composed of ‘distinct spheres’, such as ‘politics and economics’, ‘agents and structures’, ‘discourses and materiality’ or ‘states and markets’, that, at best, are understood as separate entities that then interact with each other (Bieler and Morton 2018a: 6). This ‘dualist framing’ is transversal to most neo-realist and neo-liberal approaches and some versions of constructivism and post-structuralism. The consequences of a ‘dualist framing’ are evident in the way, for example, that Waltzian neorealism abstracts the international states system from underlying social dynamics and their connection with human productive activity. From a historical materialist perspective, this entails ‘a failure to account for the social basis of state power or the historically specific ideologies and material practices that have constituted and sustained state identities across different orders’ (Bieler and Morton 2018a: 7). A ‘dualist framing’ is thus revealed as a theory with little explanatory power and conducive to an inadequate understanding of the dynamics of international relations. Rather, historical materialism proposes a ‘philosophy of internal relations’ in which the character of capitalist globalization ‘is considered as a social relation in such a way that the internal ties between the relations of

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production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle can be realised’ (Bieler and Morton 2018a: 9). In the following two sections, the potential of historical materialism as an approach to the study of international relations is further explored; first, via a discussion of classical theories of imperialism and dependency in historical materialism, and second, through a discussion of recent historical materialist scholarship in International Relations. Key Concept: Historical Materialism Historical materialism refers to a way of understanding the long-term development of the human species that analyses how history is shaped not by the autonomous development of human ideas and social formations but by their interrelations with changing material conditions through human productive activity. The concept is frequently limited in its understanding and applicability by its Soviet-orthodox interpretation that slides back into a form of natural-

istic and mechanistic materialism, where the material conditions of human existence are understood to determine human ideas, culture and social forms. A more adequate understanding of the concept sees it as practical materialism, or what Gramsci (1971: part III) called a ‘philosophy of praxis’, where human agency plays a key role in the interrelations between changing material conditions and the development of human ideas and social formations.

Imperialism and Dependency Marx and Engels’ writings raised key questions about the tensions between centrifugal and centripetal forces in the modern world, and they began to grapple with the peculiar paradox that human societies were becoming more closely interconnected, and indeed internationalist to a degree, and yet national loyalties were often untouched by those changes. Assumptions about how capitalist globalization would be replaced by socialist internationalism had to be rethought as a result of the increased importance of nationalism and geopolitical rivalries in the late 19th century. The theory of capitalist imperialism should be seen in that light. Lenin (1968) and Bukharin (1972) developed a distinctive explanation of the causes of the First World War. They argued that the conflict was the result of a desperate need for new outlets for the surplus capital that had been accumulated by the leading capitalist societies. The approach has been largely contested on familiar grounds – not least for assuming the primacy of economic forces. Lenin was particularly adamant on the primacy of these forces, noting how abandoning that standpoint imperilled revolutionary politics (Linklater 1990; Hobson 2000: ch. 2; 2010). It was an attempt to understand how political communities became more violently nationalistic in that period – a necessary preoccupation given the earlier confidence that the dominant historical trend was towards closer cooperation between national proletariats (Linklater 1990: ch. 4). The theory of capitalist imperialism remains interesting as an attempt to develop a more complex historical materialist interpretation of globalization and nationalism, capitalism and warfare. A central aim was to criticize the liberal proposition that industrial capitalism was committed to free trade internationalism that would bring an end to war. The analysis combined the Marxian claim that capitalism was destined to experience frequent crises with the observation that such instabilities led not only to class conflict but also to dangerous international rivalries. It is worth pausing to note that in the 1930s, Carr (2001) drew the conclusion that global market forces had be

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brought under control by innovative planning so that future disturbances did not result in the dissolution of international order. Lenin and Bukharin maintained that the dominant tendency of the era was the rise of mercantilist states that were willing to use force to achieve their economic and political objectives. National accumulations of surplus capital were regarded as the main reason for the demise of a relatively peaceful international system, but Lenin recognized that the decline of British hegemony and the changing balance of military power contributed to the relaxation of constraints on the use of force in relations between societies. Lenin and Bukharin maintained that nationalist and militarist ideologies had blurred class loyalties and stymied class conflict in the changing international political environment. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin (1968: 102) claimed that no ‘Chinese wall separates the [working class] from the other classes’. Indeed, a labour aristocracy bribed by colonial profits and closely aligned with the bourgeoisie had developed in monopoly capitalist societies. With the outbreak of the First World War, the working classes, which had become ‘chained to the chariot of […] bourgeois state power’, were quick to answer the nationalist call to defend the homeland (Bukharin 1972: 166). It was assumed, however, that the shift of the ‘centre of gravity’ from class conflict to inter-state rivalry would not last indefinitely. The horrors of war would reveal that the working classes’ ‘share in the imperialist policy [was] nothing compared with the wounds inflicted’ by it (1972: 167). Instead of ‘clinging to the narrowness of the national state’, and succumbing to the patriotic ideal of ‘defending or extending the boundaries of the bourgeois state’, the proletariat would finally realize its mission of ‘abolishing state boundaries and merging all the peoples into one Socialist family’ (1972: 167). Lenin and Bukharin’s theories of capitalist imperialism had the virtue of focusing on the tensions between globalization and fragmentation in world politics. That theme has increased in importance in the social sciences over recent decades, with a concomitant renewal in critical interest in these theories (see Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009; Callinicos 2002, 2009, 2010; Harvey 2003; Robinson 2004; Rees 2006; Fuchs 2010a, b; Panitch and Gindin 2013). Central to these developments remains Lenin’s (1964: 27) observation that: Developing capitalism knows two historical tendencies in the national question. The first is the awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against all national oppression, and the creation of national states. The second is the development and growing frequency of international intercourse in every form, the breakdown of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, of economic life in general, of politics, science etc. The contention that globalization and fragmentation advance in tandem was taken further in what came to be known as Third World Marxism. The idea of a ‘labour aristocracy’ in capitalist societies introduced a theme that would become fundamental to neo-Marxist dependency theory and world-systems analysis in the post-colonial era. The contention was that the proletariat in capitalist societies was as implicated as the bourgeoise in exploiting peripheral peoples in the global capitalist system. Subordinated peoples across the world had responded to that condition by endeavouring to escape economic exploitation not by forging alliances with Western proletariats but by embracing the politics of national independence. The question for Marxists (who were in the main hostile to, or suspicious of, nationalism) was how far, and whether, Marxism should regard nationalist movements as a worthy ally in the larger struggle for universal emancipation.

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Lenin recognized that particular groups such as the Jews were oppressed because of their religion or ethnicity, and that demands for national self-determination were hardly surprising. Although he believed that socialists should support progressive national movements, he rejected the Austro-Marxists’ suggested solution to the ‘national question’. They advocated a federal approach that would grant national groups significant autonomy within existing states. Lenin’s position was that national movements should be forced to choose between complete secession and continued membership of the state, but with exactly the same rights as all other citizens. Lenin’s speculation was that most nationalist groups would decide against secession, realizing that they would forfeit the levels of material prosperity that were provided by economies of scale in larger social systems. Movements that did opt for secession would gain freedom from the forms of domination that had bred national enmity or distrust. In time, Lenin thought, closer links between separate national proletariats would develop. The point was to avoid the compromise with nationalism that Austro-Marxists had favoured. Proletarian internationalism was more important than creating multicultural political communities (Linklater 1990: ch. 3). The approaches that have been surveyed shared Marx’s earlier conviction that capitalism was progressive in that it would bring industrial development and wealth to the rest of the world (along with liberation from what Marx regarded as the slavish superstition that pervaded pre-capitalist societies in the periphery; though in his later life, and especially in the ethnographic notebooks and in studies of non-Western and pre-capitalist societies, Marx began to develop a multilinear conception of human development that is not evident in the major works (see Anderson 2010: chs. 5 and 6)). Post-Second World War neo-Marxist theories of global development and underdevelopment broke with that idea. Dependency theorists such as Frank (1967) argued that exploitative alliances between the dominant class interests in core and peripheral societies blocked the latter’s industrialization. On that argument, secession from the capitalist world economy was imperative if the periphery was to industrialize. Building on dependency theory, but avoiding too crude a division between core and peripheral nations, world-systems theory, as developed by Wallerstein in the 1970s and 1980s, challenged the classical Marxist view that industrial capitalism would in the long run promote economic development everywhere (for a summary of world-systems theory see Wallerstein 2004). Frank and Wallerstein’s positions have been described as neo-Marxist because they shifted the emphasis of their inquiries from relations of production to relations of exchange or trade in a world market. The intricacies of such discussions need not detain us here (Linklater 1990: ch. 6). However, a crucial difference was that neo-Marxists argued that the unprecedented material wealth of capitalist societies cannot be explained as the result of the transition from feudalism to capitalism within Europe. It was crucial to understand that capitalist prosperity was achieved by incorporating colonized and peripheral peoples in an exploitative global capitalist economy and by forcing them to produce raw materials and other commodities that were in short supply in the capitalist West (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989, 2011; Frank and Gills 1993). As noted earlier, Western Marxists disagreed profoundly about whether or not to support Third World national liberation movements, and many feared that the compromise with nationalism would sacrifice the internationalism of classical Marxism (Warren 1980; Naim 1981; Dunayevskaya 2000). Important questions arise about how far any such global vision is not universal at all because it is tied to particular cultural biases and interests and can easily give rise to new forms of power (Hobson 2012). Sensitivities to those issues became prominent in International

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Relations as a result of the influence of post-structuralism and post-colonialism. They are clearly pertinent to the interpretation of Marxism as an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment. It emerged in a phase of European overseas dominance in which confidence in the superiority of Western civilization and certainty in the need for a civilizing mission to elevate Europe’s ‘social inferiors’ was at its height. Dependency theory and world-systems analysis, and Third World Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, challenged those assumptions. Those shifting orientations are interesting manifestations of how scholars have endeavoured to understand long-term processes of global change from Marxist or neo-Marxist perspectives, and they also shaped broader developments in the social sciences and in International Relations. Dependency theory in the 1970s encouraged a broadening of horizons, so that the discipline focused on ‘North–South’ relations as well as ‘East–West’ relations and the connections between them. The aim was to construct more global perspectives that moved beyond the attempts by 19th-century European thinkers to understand their world, and to suppose that outlying regions had only marginal importance. Efforts to construct a ‘global’ social science that considers social and political developments in long-term perspective without the Eurocentrism of old appeared in an era when non-Western peoples were engaged in struggles to reduce injustices in world politics. Neo-Marxist analyses of patterns of uneven development within the capitalist world economy, and reflections on the plight of the ‘periphery’, reflected those changes. They enlarged the study of international relations that had been largely preoccupied with strategic relations between the great powers and narrowly focused on questions of order and stability at the expense of issues of global justice.

T he Continued Relevance of Marxism for International Relations We have seen that the consensus within mainstream approaches was that Marxism had little, if anything, to offer the student of international relations – apart from a catalogue of errors that the serious analyst will avoid. Realists maintained that Marxism was largely concerned with how humans acted on nature, and only secondarily with how societies interacted with each other. The importance of the state, geopolitics and war was obscured by a conceptual framework that invested all resources in analysing systems of production, class structures and class conflict. A largely unspoken assumption was that moral and political commitments prevented Marxists from providing a more detached and realistic understanding of world politics  – an interpretation that plainly neglected the pioneering role that historical materialism has played in investigating the long-term trend towards the economic and technological integration of the species (and the distinctive role that industrial capitalism has played in accelerating that process over the last two centuries). Marxist scholarship over approximately the last four decades has concentrated on developing more sophisticated explanations of world politics. Concomitantly, Marxists have continued to reflect on the meaning of universal emancipation today (see Thompson 2011, 2015; Blackledge 2012; Anderson 2017b). Before discussing some recent developments on these fronts, it is useful to note that realist assessments of historical materialism have invariably emphasized the record of Marxism in power. For example, Waltz (1959) argued that Marxists were unprepared for the realities of promoting socialism in an anarchic world of sovereign nation-states  – and especially for the exercise of

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promoting socialism in one country. Trotsky’s remark that he would issue a few revolutionary proclamations as Russia’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs before closing shop has often been cited as evidence of dismaying naivety about international affairs. Moreover, the speed with which the Soviet regime resorted to classical power politics to ensure its security and survival has long been highlighted as evidence of the superiority of realist explanation. Lenin stressed in 1919 that ‘we are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states’ (quoted in Halliday 1999: 312) – yet far from changing the international system and working towards its abolition, ‘Marxism in power’ was transformed by it. The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe provoked demands for national self-­ determination that swept socialist internationalism aside. Conflicts between socialist states demonstrated that the demise of capitalist regimes made little impression on the ‘logic of anarchy’. Failures to anticipate those events have often been regarded as evidence that historical materialism had a flawed theory of the state. Many Marxists conceded as much in the 1970s and 1980s in the course of moving away from Marx’s thesis that the capitalist state is nothing other than ‘the executive committee of the bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels 2000a: 247; see also Hobson 2010). Many argued that the capitalist state had to have some autonomy from the ruling class simply to ensure that capitalism survived. State structures had to protect capitalists from themselves by ensuring that short-term competition for profit did not drive down wages to such a degree that mass poverty and social unrest became inevitable. By providing access to welfare, the state played a critical role in reproducing the capitalist mode of production (Poulantzas 1973). Influenced by the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, several historical materialists argued that the state played a vital crucial role in placating subordinate class forces. The state ensured what Gramsci called the hegemony of the dominant class interests by incorporating some lower-class aspirations in national ideologies. Hegemony was preserved as much by consent as by coercion (Fontana 2002; Bieler and Morton 2003; Sinclair 2005; Morton 2007b; Hesketh 2017; Humphrys 2018). Other historical materialists took a different path by recognizing the importance of Max Weber’s claim that the state has considerable power and autonomy from class forces because of its monopoly control of the instruments of violence – and its claim to legitimacy by protecting society from internal and external threats. Leading analysts sought to reorient the ‘paradigm of production’ so that it had a more sophisticated understanding of ‘the relative autonomy of the state’ as well as a deeper appreciation of how the state in capitalist societies could free itself from the grip of the dominant class forces, as had occurred in Nazi Germany (Anderson 1974; Skocpol 1979; Block 1980; Linklater 1990: ch. 7; 1998, 2011; Callinicos 2007). Just as historical materialism was absorbing ideas that are more often associated with realism, the study of international relations became more open to Marxist and neo-Marxist interpretations of world politics. As explained earlier, dependency theory was influential in persuading International Relations scholars to consider the interrelations between ‘realist’ power struggles and the evolution of the modern capitalist world-economy. As far as historical materialists were concerned, the objective was to demonstrate that radical forms of international political economy that preserved the critical ethos of classical Marxism surpassed realist explanation with its impoverished commitment to geopolitical reductionism. In this context, two major approaches have become particularly influential in International Relations in recent years and will now be discussed in turn: the analysis of the uneven and combined development of global capitalism and neo-Gramscian approaches. Here it is valuable to note the differences with Marx’s understanding of how capitalism had become a global system in the first part of the 19th century. States, geopolitics and war are accorded greater

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importance in recent investigations, and the stress has shifted to how internationalization has occurred more rapidly and more extensively among the ruling elites than among the world’s diverse and internally divided counter-hegemonic movements. Such themes are evident in the uneven and combined development (UCD) approach to the study of world politics. UCD builds upon the idea first advanced by Leon Trotsky (2017) that human societies develop in ‘uneven’ and multilinear ways. Multilinearity did not mean that societies developed independently from each other. Indeed, their inescapable interrelationships produced many different forms of ‘combined’ development as societies appropriated or incorporated technological innovations, institutions and beliefs from each other. The upshot was that societies did not develop through a linear set of stages as Marx had supposed. So much was evident from the ways in which the least advanced societies could benefit from the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’. By appropriating more advanced, ready-made, technological and cultural achievements, they could ‘make leaps’ forward, compress or even ‘skip a whole range of intermediate steps’ of development that other societies had taken centuries to reach (Trotsky 2017: ch. 1). While Trotsky understood uneven and combined development as ‘the most general law of the historic process’, he largely confined his analysis of UCD to the modern era of capitalist globalization and, in particular, to the social and political conditions in pre-revolutionary Russia (Rosenberg 2006: 313). In this context, Trotsky observed that UCD explained how backward Russia was undergoing a process of capitalist industrialization and modernization while maintaining archaic feudal class structures. That distinctive combination of social and economic forces resulted from the ‘uneven’ character of societal development that pressed Russia to industrialize or to face losing its independence in a world of more powerful capitalist states – what Trotsky (2017: 5) called the ‘whip of external necessity’. Its industrialization process exhibited the ‘combined’ character of societal development as Russia could import or emulate the readily available technological, organizational, financial and other innovations of the advanced capitalist West. The way in which these were combined in a new societal form with its own archaic class structures and cultural milieu had given rise to an original pattern of capitalist modernization in Russia – one that did not follow the path that had been taken by the Western European capitalist countries. The new formation of capitalist modernity emerging in Russia, in turn, would necessarily influence Russia’s position, interests and behaviour in the international system as well as the political structures and behaviour of other societies, thereby affecting the overall process of uneven and combined development of global capitalism. Trotsky’s conception of UCD served as the basis for his theory of ‘permanent revolution’ according to which Russia, despite being in many ways a pre-modern society, did not have to go through the bourgeois stage of development or undergo a bourgeois revolution to reach socialism. In short, Russia could selectively appropriate the achievements of the more advanced capitalist societies in the larger international order of which it was part. It could enter into a new socialist phase of development under the leadership of a revolutionary proletarian movement and that could spark socialist revolutions throughout Western Europe (Trotsky 2007: ch. 1). Such developments would confirm Marx’s speculation that the socialist revolution might not begin in the leading-­edge industrialized capitalist societies but in a peripheral society such as Russia (Anderson 2010). Since the mid-1990s, UCD has gained a significant number of proponents in International Relations in no small part owing to Justin Rosenberg’s efforts to place it at the centre of a theory of ‘the international’ (see Rosenberg 1996, 2006, 2010, 2016, 2017). According to Rosenberg, Trotsky’s original conception of UCD can be significantly expanded to create a general theory of societal development, one that explains the basic precondition of ‘the international’, which is the

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existence of societal multiplicity. An ongoing debate is whether UCD can indeed become a general theory of societal development, and thus applicable to pre-capitalist contexts (Rosenberg 2010, 2013a, b; Hobson 2011) or whether it cannot be extended beyond the capitalist horizon in which it developed (Allison and Anievas 2009; Ashaman 2009; Hesketh 2017). The intricacies of this debate need not concern us here. Suffice to say that the thesis of UCD proponents is that other approaches to the study of world politics, such as Waltz’s neo-realism, that stress the foundational importance of international anarchy assume, but do not explain, societal multiplicity. Anarchy was described by Waltz as an ‘extraneous condition’ operating ‘over and against’ social and political structures within states. By contrast, UCD analysis rejects the domestic/international division and replaces ‘anarchy’ with a notion of societal multiplicity and multilinear development that foregrounds processes of uneven and combined development (Rosenberg 2013b). Its basic criticism of neo-realism is that it cannot provide a sociological explanation of the political structures and patterns of change that underpin the ‘international’. UCD is therefore promoted as the core idea in a new sociological explanation of international dynamics that, in Rosenberg’s words, illuminates the ‘causal role of interactive multiplicity in social development’ (Rosenberg 2013b: 225; 2016). More specifically, the analysis of the intertwined relations between the domestic and the international – and between internal and external social processes  – shows how the condition of societal multiplicity influences patterns of change within human societies, which, in turn, influence the development of societal multiplicity. There has been a significant proliferation of UCD-inspired research in International Relations in the recent period, covering a wide range of topics: from the already mentioned discussions of the extent to which UCD can only be applied to the study of capitalist modernity or be used more expansively to explain developments across much longer time-horizons (see Matin 2007; Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008; Allison and Anievas 2009; Anievas 2010; Rosenberg 2010; Hobson 2011; Anievas and Matin 2016); to studies on the origins of the First World War (Rosenberg 2013b; Anievas 2012; Green 2011; Thomas 2015); investigations of colonialism and empire (Makki 2011, 2015; Moldovan 2018); and of the historical development of China (Davidson 2006; Cooper 2015; Liu 2016), Japan (Allison and Anievas 2010; Mckenna 2015) or Iran (Matin 2007, 2010). Concomitant with the development of UCD, neo-Gramscian perspectives on the study of world politics have also come to the forefront in recent years and, as is discussed shortly, offer the potential for a productive dialogue with UCD in the development of a historical materialist theory of international relations. Neo-Gramscianism in International Relations traces its origin to Robert Cox’s work on international political economy, where his studies on the relation between social forces, states and world orders remain one of the most ambitious attempts to use historical materialism to move beyond conventional international relations theory. Cox analysed the relationship between those three levels, stressing that states and the international institutions that preserve world order do not simply express the will of the dominant social classes. Systems of production could be as much the cause as the effect of developments at those other levels. The point was that one had to understand how their interrelations found expression in what Gramsci called the ‘historic blocs’ that govern national societies. Echoing Gramsci’s interest in how hegemony operates through coercion and consent, Cox argued for analysing world hegemony not in conventional terms, as one power’s military domination over the others, but as a constellation of class forces, state structures and international organizations that ensured the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Especially important in Cox’s perspective were ‘counter-hegemonic movements’ and the extent to which their efforts to change the global distribution of political and economic

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power were thwarted by hegemonic strategies to co-opt and divide opponents of the current world order (Cox 1981, 1983, 1996, 2007; see also Cox and Schechter 2003; Brincat 2014). The neo-Gramscian school has actively developed the study of the origins, development and possible transformation of global hegemony (Pijl 1998, 2012; Bieler and Morton 2006, 2018a, b; Rupert and Solomon 2006; Ayers 2008; Gill 2008, 2012; Bieler et al. 2016; Bieler and Lee 2017). It has analysed how hegemony is preserved by forms of cooperation between powerful elites inside and outside the core regions of the world system, and by a web of international economic and political institutions that are responsible for global governance (Ayers 2009, 2012b; Gill 2010, 2015; Ayers and Saad-Filho 2014; see also Cox 1983; Gill 1995; Rupert 1995; Bromley 1999; Gamble 1999; Hay 1999). The idea of ‘disciplinary neo-liberalism’ contributed to that investigation as did the notion of ‘new constitutionalism’, which refers to how international institutions use international law as a governing technique that combines coercion and consent to pressure national governments into accepting neo-liberal conceptions of the state and society (Gill and Cutler 2015). In the process, these institutions help establish what Gramsci (1971) called ‘the common sense of the epoch’, referring to key uncontested notions about how the state, civil society and the rule of law should be organized that are diffused throughout the world under the supposedly neutral and technical heading of ‘global governance’ (Gill 2015: 30). Global governance is thus revealed as a form of hegemony that contributes to the establishment and globalization of ‘neoliberal market civilization’ and the specific modes of consciousness and societal organization it implies (Gill 2015: 30). Such hegemonic orientation underlines, for example, the development of concepts such as ‘failed states’ and the reforms that are envisioned to reconstruct societies that fall into this category (Ayers 2012b), the development of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programmes (Mueller 2011) or global austerity measures (Major 2013), with their associated promotion of forms of limited procedural democratization and economic privatization. These pressures on national governments express the power of a transnational capitalist class that is actively involved in transforming the global economic and political system. Crucial manifestations of its hegemonic free market vision are efforts to deregulate major sectors of national economies and to facilitate transnational corporate activity (see van der Pijl 1998, 2012; Robinson and Harris 2000; Morton 2007b; Gill 2016). Free market ideologies, it is argued, remove the ‘economic’ domain from the principles of ‘democratic deliberation’ that capitalist societies have regarded as essential in the ‘political’ sphere; leaving individuals, who are often torn from traditional communities, powerless in the face of advancing global forces (Robinson and Harris 2000; Barder 2013; Diez 2013; Taylor 2017). Contemporary formulations of historical materialism have provided innovative analyses of the consolidation of such global power structures but, in keeping with Marx’s Hegelian claim that all societies contain the seeds of their own destruction, they have also focused on ‘the resistances these engender’ and the conceptions of different forms of social and political organization that are integral to counter-hegemonic movements (Rupert 2003: 181; also Rupert 2000, 2006; Worth and Kuhling 2004; Rupert and Solomon 2005; Balci 2017). Reflecting broader movements within 20th-century Marxism, the emphasis falls on what Cox (1983: 173) calls the ‘counter-hegemonic’ elements in the global order that challenge the dominant power arrangements and the role of neo-­liberal conceptions of society and politics. Some analysts have focused specifically on the political importance of the ‘anti-globalist Far Right’, the ‘progressive elites and national movements’ in Latin America and elsewhere, and the constituent parts of ‘the global justice movement’ (Bandy and Smith 2005; Robinson

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2004; Della Porta 2007; Morelock 2018). In some accounts, one of the challenges is to understand the nature and potential of resistance movements in the traditional ‘periphery’ – that is, the struggles of ‘subaltern groups’ in the regions outside the centres where industrial capitalism and socialist projects first developed. Such struggles can be regarded as part of an ongoing ‘revolt against the West’. They point to ways in which English School analyses (see Chapter 5) of that phenomenon are relevant to – and can also learn from – historical materialist reflections on changing relations between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’. They draw attention to the importance of debate and discussion between historical materialists and ‘postcolonial’ scholars (see Chapter 5) whose studies act as a counterweight to the Eurocentrism of traditional Marxism (Hobson 2012) as well as to some post-structuralist analysis of the politics of identity (Bieler and Morton 2010).

Box 6.1 The Rise of China as Passive Revolution The rise of China has been said to hold the potential for either conflict or cooperation between China and the Western liberal order depending on whether one adopts a realist/neo-realist or liberal/neo-liberal perspective (Ikenberry 2008, 2014; Mearsheimer 2014). These perspectives can be criticized for sharing a ‘dualist-framing’ that separates politics from economics and foreign relations from domestic politics. A historical materialist alternative instead understands the political and the economic, the domestic and the international as ‘differentiated forms of the same underlying social relations of production’ (Bieler and Morton 2018a, b: 161). From that perspective, China’s rise can be understood as a ‘passive revolution’ carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)  – one that seeks to simultaneously adapt to the ‘whip of external necessity’ of capitalist modernization while reinforcing the CCP’s domestic legitimacy (Gray 2010, 2015; Bieler and Morton 2018a, b: ch. 7). Since the 1970s, the post-Maoist CCP sought to address problems arising from the geopolitics of the Cold War, such as the growing tensions with the USSR and its inability to industrialize through a strategy of ‘enmeshment with the international division of labour’ (Gray 2010: 456). China’s passive revolution thus implied a ‘revolution from above’ in which the CCP imposed the necessary reforms to ensure the capitalist modernization of Chinese society while co-opting rising social groups into the hegemonic political order it controlled, hence forestalling more radical reforms (Gray 2010: 456). By drawing attention to the enmeshment of the domestic and international economic, political and geopolitical dimensions of China’s rise, historical

materialism points to how the deep interdependence of China, the USA and Europe makes these regions, and indeed the global economy as a whole, particularly susceptible to the effects of the future dynamics of China’s passive revolution and its capacity to integrate an actor that escapes the notice of mainstream approaches: the Chinese proletariat. The CCP’s hegemony in China, despite its particularly coercive character, still depends on consent from a growing number of Chinese proletarians. While there is no evidence of a broad Chinese labour movement, labourers’ resistance to extreme exploitation is becoming more frequent and holds the potential to elicit responses from the CCP via improvements in wages and working conditions (Bieler and Lee 2017). These imply increases in labour costs that might compel foreign capitalist enterprises to move to other cheap labour markets. Such a development would undermine China’s economy and show the narrative about China’s rise to be a ‘discourse artificially created […] to ensure a continuation of capitalist accumulation’ through spatial dislocation (Bieler and Morton 2018a, b: 185). But China’s interdependence with the USA and Europe also means that any crisis of capitalist reproduction in the country will send shockwaves throughout the global economy that might destabilize global capitalist hegemony. Historical materialism thus shows how, in assessing China’s rise, it is not enough to analyse its external relations in a simple conflict/cooperation dichotomy but that it is vital to analyse the connections between domestic class struggles, geopolitics and the uneven and combined development of global capitalism.

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Parallel with neo-Gramscian discussions of hegemony and counter-hegemony, another Gramscian concept that has been deployed in International Relations to great effect in recent years is that of ‘passive revolution’. Gramsci developed this notion to explain what he understood as the process by which, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, feudal classes across Europe, namely in the context of the Italian Risorgimento, actively sought accommodation with their national bourgeoisies in ways that permitted the latter to gain power and transform society in a capitalist direction without, however, violently overthrowing and displacing the old feudal classes that transitioned from a ‘dominant’ position to a ‘governing’ one (Gramsci 1971: 115). Passive revolutions are understood as a form of ‘revolution from above’, commanded by state power, rather than the outcome of a popular movement from below, as in the case of the French Revolution. They imply a combination of revolution and restoration to the extent that social relations are reorganized along capitalist lines, but such reorganization is not the result of popular uprising but rather something that is imposed on society from above, implying the perpetuation of state control by feudal and bourgeois classes (Gramsci 1971: 215). The concept was understood by Gramsci as having analytical purchase beyond the Italian context, expressing the character of the modernization processes in the majority of European societies. It captured how dominant social classes in most European countries simultaneously sought to adapt to the external pressures of capitalist modernization and to catch up with the more developed states on the continent, while containing the internal pressure of subaltern classes rising in social power as a consequence of that same capitalist modernization. Recent neo-Gramscian scholarship has noted how the concept of passive revolution is internally related to the notion of uneven and combined development and can consequently be employed in a mutually reinforcing dialogue with UCD literature. Passive revolution provides ‘historical and geographical specificity’ (Hesketh 2017: 400) to UCD to the extent that it permits theorizing national contexts as a ‘point of arrival within the international conditioning of capitalist expansion’ (Morton 2007a, b: 615). Passive revolution provides concreteness to the analysis of the uneven and combined expansion of capitalist modernity by permitting an assessment of the several national combinations that have historically emerged as a result of the uneven expansion of capitalist modernity. It permits an ‘interpretative approach’ focused ‘on interrelated instances of state transition within world-historical processes where the particulars of state formation are realised within the general features of capitalist modernity’ (Morton 2007a, b: 618; see also Bieler and Morton 2018a, b). This is evidenced by recent literature analysing processes of passive revolution in different contexts ranging from studies on Welsh devolution (Evans 2018) to Scottish capitalist modernization in the 19th century (Davidson 2010), Gorbachev’s perestroika policies in Russia (Simon 2010), the development of environmental governance in China’s rare-earth industry (Böhm and Reynolds 2018), the relationship between state and labour struggles in China (Gray 2010, 2015) and the transition to capitalism and processes of state formation in Mexico (Hesketh 2010, 2014; Morton 2010). While some have displayed scepticism towards the broad range of application of the concept of passive revolution (Callinicos 2010), the proliferation of UCD and neo-Gramscian perspectives demonstrates the continuing vitality of historical materialist investigations of international relations in the world capitalist system. Predominantly, these approaches assume an explanatory outlook that lacks Marx and Engels’ early confidence that counter-hegemonic resistance reveals that the transition from capitalism to socialism is under way. But they remain committed to the ambition of finding evidence of the immanent potential for alternative world orders.

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The commitment of inquiries in the ‘spirit of Marxism’ may not command much support amongst the advocates of other critical perspectives such as feminism and post-colonial theory. They are predominantly inclined to regard historical materialism as an approach that has not been ‘on their side’. In short, the traditional emphasis was on understanding and eradicating class exploitation rather than patriarchy or imperial ideologies that were suffused with notions of Western cultural and racial superiority. Advocates of post-structuralism and post-colonialism rarely turn to the perspective for inspiration and insight. They are more likely to perceive it as a specialist form of international political economy that has reconstructed rather than transcended the paradigm of production. But as this chapter has sought to demonstrate, Marx and Engels were sensitive to the intertwinement of class struggles with issues of race, nationalism and empire and Marxist approaches retain their strength and have witnessed significant innovation in recent years as an explanatory framework to understand world politics. Hence, non-Marxist or ‘post-Marxist’ critical theory is deficient unless it engages with the Marxian legacy (Box 6.1).

Conclusion Marxism was once the dominant version of critical theory, one that combined the analysis of the long-term trend towards the globalization of social relations with a political economy of the revolutionary impact of industrial capitalism and a vision of universal emancipation. No previous approach to politics and history had operated on such an ambitious scale. That conception of social inquiry has no counterpart within the study of international relations. Marx’s writings set out a vision of the whole of human history, of the rise and development of industrial capitalism, of internal crises and social struggles that may lead to new forms of social organization – in short, a vision of what the social sciences should aspire to that remains standard-setting to this day. In one crucial respect, mainstream standpoints have largely failed to deal with historical materialism on its terms. There is an important contrast with the neo-realist interest in explaining the persistence of geopolitical rivalries across many millennia. Marxists have emphasized the necessity of placing those recurrent forces in their historical context: the latter do not operate in exactly the same way in all eras, but interact with the dominant power structures and forms of political resistance. From that perspective, it is not historical materialism that is guilty of reductionism but neo-­realism that commits the error of assuming that international relations in all periods and places can be explained in terms of a timeless logic of anarchy (Teschke 2003). As a version of critical theory, Marxism has been especially interested in understanding areas of resistance that realists and neo-­realists do not regard as central dimensions of world politics. But what is marginally interesting from the vantage point of those perspectives is highly significant from critical-theoretical perspectives such as Marxism. They are most interested in ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggles that advance new conceptions of society and visions of freedom. Central to that focus is the conviction that first appeared in Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy, that explanations of the social world are never as neutral or as objective as they may appear. Albeit unintentionally, they may promote forms of knowledge that entrench existing forms of power and domination rather than contest them as part of an exercise in understanding how society can be organized to free people from unnecessary constraints. For such reasons, historical materialism has been a key resource in the critique of realism and neo-realism, in efforts to explain the interrelations between the development of the modern states-­ system and the evolution of industrial capitalism, and in analyses of capitalist globalization and the

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national and other divisions and conflicts that have developed alongside it. In the main, rival approaches that investigate the politics of gender, ethnicity or race do not draw on historical materialism or its classical vision of universal emancipation. However, that perspective has a range that is unusual in the social sciences, since it combines the empirical analysis of long-term social and political processes with an emancipatory vision and the aspiration to understand how it can be realized in practice. One must doubt that critical theory can be based entirely around historical materialism, but there is still much to be said for the thesis that it should proceed in the ‘spirit of Marxism’, and aim to understand (from an emancipatory standpoint) the processes that have drawn societies into longer webs of interconnectedness and intertwined domestic and international conflicts over centuries and indeed millennia, and not just over the last few decades.

Glossary of Terms Capitalism: A historical mode of production in which the majority of the technological and cultural means of production are privately owned and controlled by a minority of the population and oriented towards the generation of profit. Mode of production: The technologies and their cultural contexts through which people relate to non-human nature and to each other in the process of producing and reproducing the ways in which they endeavour to satisfy their historically formed and developing needs. Passive revolution: How dominant social classes in specific geographical national contexts use state power to promote the capitalist modernization of their societies in ways that simultaneously adapt to international pressures to modernize and repress/co-opt the domestic subaltern classes.

Uneven and combined development: The way human societies, especially under global capitalism, do not follow a single linear path of historical development but rather exhibit a multilinear trajectory characterized by diverse simultaneous combinations of characteristics of different modes of production.

Further Reading Anievas, A. (ed.) (2010) Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (Abingdon: Routledge). Anievas, A. and Nişancıoğlu, K. (2015) How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press). Bieler, A. and Morton, A. (2018) Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Linklater, A. (1990) Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press). Morton, A. (2007) Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (London: Pluto). Teschke, B. (2003) The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso). van der Pijl, K. (1998) Transnational Classes and International Relations (London: Routledge).

CRITICAL THEORY RICHARD DEVETAK

7

Critical theory is a theory of both crisis and critique. Motivated to explore and find responses to multiple crises afflicting humanity and the world, it embodies an attitude or ethos of critique. How a crisis is identified and diagnosed, however, depends on the conceptual and theoretical framework used. Just as importantly, the ethos of critique is also open to competing understandings. Indeed, in recent years there has been a growing chorus of critics that has accused the theory of blunting its critical edge. Critical theory, so the argument goes, has become incapable of offering an incisive diagnosis or explanation of the present age’s contradictions and dynamics. By virtue of its attraction to cosmopolitanism, it has become an insipid copy of an originally radical restructuring of world politics (Jahn 1998; Schmid 2018). In short, critical theory is accused of becoming ‘uncritical’. Such criticisms assume there is a single true form of critique, usually some revised form of Marxism, from which critical theory has deviated. While this chapter will not engage directly with these critics, it suffices to say that critical theory rejects that assumption and remains ‘a site of permanent contestation, questioning and self-reflection’ (Brincat et al. 2014: 4). Nonetheless, it does set out a distinctive form of international relations theory that places self-reflection at the heart of its version of critique and is guided by a long-term project of emancipatory politics. It uses the methods of critique to overcome crisis. This has led critical theorists to examine a wide range of issues that reflect dimensions of interlinked global crises. Among the issue areas addressed by critical theorists of international relations in recent years are international security (Fierke 2007; Peoples 2011; Booth 2012), technology and weapons (Peoples 2010, 2019), the war on terror (Burke 2004, 2005), humanitarian intervention (Devetak 2007; Head 2008), global governance (Kapoor 2004; Payne and Samhat 2004), climate change and the environment (Laferriere 1996; Weber 2006) and the internet and information technology (McCarthy 2015; Scheuerman 2016; McCarthy and Fluck 2017), to name only a few. On a broader scale, Andrew Linklater (2011), one of the foremost proponents of critical theory in International Relations, has published two volumes of a projected three-volume study of harm in international relations, and has been joined by other critical theorists in pursuit of a cosmopolitan politics (Benhabib 2006; Beardsworth 2011). Others have restated and advanced the case for a critical theory of international relations in general (Weber 2002, 2005, 2014; Anievas 2005; Haacke 2005; Roach 2010; Brincat 2012; Levine 2012; Brincat et al. 2014). Still others have explored the interlocution of critical theory with classical realism (Cozette 2008; Beardsworth 2017; Behr 2017). This chapter seeks to provide an overview of the main features of critical international theory that have characterized it over the years. The first part sketches the origins of critical theory;

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the second offers an examination of the political nature of knowledge claims in international relations; and the third details critical international theory’s attempt to place questions of community at the centre of the study of international relations. Differences will emerge among critical theorists, but if there is one thing that holds together the disparate group of scholars who subscribe to ‘critical theory’, it is the idea that the study of international relations should be oriented by an emancipatory politics.

Origins of Critical Theory Critical theory has its roots in a strand of thought that is often traced back to the Enlightenment and connected to the writings of Kant, Hegel and Marx. While this is an important lineage in the birth of critical theory, it is not the only one that can be traced, as there is also the imprint of classical Greek thought on autonomy and democracy to be considered, as well as the disenchanted thinking of Nietzsche and Weber. However, in the 20th century, critical theory became most closely associated with a distinct body of thought known as the Frankfurt School (Jay 1973). It is in the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal and, more recently, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth that critical theory acquired a renewed potency and in which the term critical theory came to be used as the emblem of a philosophy that questions modern social and political life through a method of immanent critique. It was largely an attempt to recover a critical and emancipatory potential that had been overrun by recent intellectual, social, cultural, political, economic and technological trends. Essential to the Frankfurt School’s critical theory was a concern to comprehend the central features of contemporary society by understanding its historical and social development, and tracing contradictions in the present that may open up the possibility of transcending contemporary society and its built-in pathologies and forms of domination. Critical theory intended ‘not simply to eliminate one or other abuse’ but to analyse the underlying social structures that result in these abuses with the intention of overcoming them (Horkheimer 1972: 206). For the Frankfurt School, this included an analysis and critique of instrumental rationality (Jay 2016) – the form of reason oriented to the domination of nature and others. It is not difficult to notice the presence here of the theme advanced by Marx in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx 1977a: 158). This normative injunction to identify immanent possibilities for social transformation is a defining characteristic of a line of thought that extends, at least, from the Enlightenment and Kant, through Marx, to contemporary critical theorists such as Habermas and Honneth. The injunction to analyse the possibilities of emancipation in the modern world entailed critical analyses of both obstructions to, and intrinsic tendencies towards, ‘the rational organization of human activity’ (Horkheimer 1972: 223). Indeed, this concern extends the line of thought back beyond Kant to the classical Greek conviction that the rational constitution of the polis finds its expression in individual autonomy and the establishment of justice and democracy. Politics, on this understanding, is the realm concerned with realizing the just life. There is, however, an important difference between critical theorists and the Greeks, which relates to the conditions under which knowledge claims can be made regarding social and political life. There are two points worth recalling in this regard: first, the Kantian point that reflection on

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the limits of what we can know is a fundamental part of theorizing; and, second, a Hegelian and Marxian point that knowledge is always, and irreducibly, conditioned by historical and material contexts. In Mark Rupert’s words (2003: 186), knowledge is always ‘situated knowledge’. Since critical theory takes society itself as its object of analysis, and since theories and acts of theorizing are never independent of society, critical theory’s scope of analysis must necessarily include reflection on theory. In short, critical theory must be self-reflective; it must include an account of its own genesis and application in society. By drawing attention to the relationship between knowledge and society, which is so frequently excluded from mainstream theoretical analysis, critical theory recognizes the political nature of knowledge claims. It was based on this recognition that Horkheimer distinguished between two conceptions of theory, which he referred to as ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theories. Traditional conceptions of theory picture the theorist at a remove from the object of analysis. By analogy with the natural sciences, they insist that subject and object must be strictly separated in order to theorize objectively. Traditional conceptions of theory assume there is an external world ‘out there’ to study, and that an inquiring subject can study this world in a detached and objective manner by withdrawing from the world and leaving behind any ideological beliefs, values or opinions which would invalidate the inquiry. To qualify as theory, it must at least be value-free. On this view, theory is possible only on condition that an inquiring subject can withdraw from the world it studies (and in which it exists) and rid itself of all biases. This contrasts with critical conceptions that deny the possibility of value-­free social analysis. By recognizing that theories are always embedded in social and political life, critical conceptions of theory allow for an examination of the purposes and functions served by different theories. However, while such conceptions of theory recognize the unavoidability of taking their orientation from the social context in which they are situated, their guiding interest is one of emancipation from, rather than legitimation and consolidation of, existing social forms. The purpose underlying critical, as opposed to traditional, conceptions of theory is to improve human existence by abolishing injustice (Horkheimer 1972). As articulated by Horkheimer (1972: 215), this conception of theory does not simply present an expression of the ‘concrete historical situation’; it also acts as ‘a force within [that situation] to stimulate change’. It allows for the intervention of humans in the making of their history. It should be noted that while critical theory had not directly addressed the international level until recently, this in no way implies that international relations is beyond the limits of its concern. The writings of Kant and Marx, in particular, have demonstrated that what happens at the international level is of immense significance to the achievement of universal emancipation. It is the continuation of this project in which critical international theory is engaged. The Frankfurt School, however, never addressed international relations in its critiques of the modern world, and Habermas made only scant reference to it until recently (see Habermas 1998, 2003a, 2006; Habermas and Derrida 2003). The main tendency of critical theory was to take individual society as the focus, neglecting the dimension of relations between and across societies. For critical international theory, however, the task is to extend the trajectory of Frankfurt School critical theory beyond the domestic realm to the international – or, more accurately, global – realm. It makes a case for a theory of world politics that is ‘committed to the emancipation of the species’ (Linklater 1990a: 8). Such a theory would no longer be confined to an individual state or society, but would examine relations between and across them, and reflect on the possibility of extending the rational, just and democratic organization of political society across the globe (Neufeld 1995: ch. 1; Shapcott 2001).

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Key Concept: Frankfurt School The name given to an émigré group of German social theorists and philosophers, led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno among others, who were associated with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt before exiling to the USA during the Nazi regime. Pioneering a form of social theory influenced by

German idealism (Kant and Hegel) and historical materialism (Marxism), they developed a theory aimed at challenging prevailing social, political and economic structures in an effort to emancipate humanity from unjust forms of domination and exclusion. It is the Frankfurt School that is the chief intellectual influence for critical theory in IR.

To summarize, critical theory draws upon various strands of Western social, political and philosophical thought in order to erect a theoretical framework capable of reflecting on the nature and purposes of theory and revealing both obvious and subtle forms of injustice and domination in society. Critical theory not only challenges and dismantles traditional forms of theorizing, it also problematizes and seeks to dismantle entrenched forms of rationality and social life that constrain human freedom. Critical international theory is an extension of this critique to the international domain. The next part of the chapter focuses on the attempt by critical international theorists to dismantle traditional forms of theorizing by promoting more self-reflective theory.

T he Politics of Knowledge in International Relations Theory It was not until the 1980s, and the onset of the so-called ‘third debate’, that questions relating to the politics of knowledge were taken seriously in the study of international relations. Epistemological questions regarding the justification and verification of knowledge claims, the methodology applied, the scope and purpose of inquiry and ontological questions regarding the nature of the social actors and other historical formations and structures in international relations all carry normative implications that had been inadequately addressed. One of the important contributions of critical international theory has been to widen the object domain of International Relations, to include the politics of knowledge, comprising epistemological and ontological assumptions, and explicating their connection to prior political commitments. This section outlines the way in which critical theory brings knowledge claims in international relations under critical scrutiny. First, it considers the question of epistemology by describing how Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical conceptions of theory has been taken up in international relations; and second, it elaborates the connection between critical theory and the emancipatory imperative. The result of this scrutinizing is to reveal the role of political interests in knowledge formation. Knowledge formation is not just a practice of theorists. Actors and organizations in international relations also engage in the production of knowledge. Consider the way international actors from states to multilateral organizations in their commitment to transparency publish and disseminate information to legitimize their governance structures and practices. As Matthew Fluck and Daniel McCarthy (2019) argue, the centrality ascribed to transparency as a tool of democratic

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accountability and empowerment often tends to reify and fetishize information, turning it into a thing or object that can be exchanged for legitimacy. They argue that a critical international theory should view information as constitutive of the world rather than simply revelatory. The point here is that information, as a form of knowledge, is curated and formed in ways that conceal power and interests and sustain social forces and institutions. Consequently, critical international theorists reject the idea that knowledge is neutral or non-­ political. Whereas traditional theories tend to see power and interests as a posteriori factors affecting outcomes in interactions between political actors in the sphere of international relations, critical international theorists insist that they are by no means absent in the formation and verification of knowledge claims. Indeed, they are a priori factors affecting the production of knowledge, hence Kimberly Hutchings’ (1999: 69) assertion that ‘international relations theory is not only about politics, it also is itself political’. This applies to theory as well. As Robert Cox (1981: 128) succinctly and famously said, ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’.

Problem-Solving and Critical Theories In his pioneering 1981 article, Cox distinguished critical from problem-solving theory. Despite appearances, Cox (2012: 18) insisted that he had been unaware of the Frankfurt School’s work in general, or Horkheimer’s distinction in particular, when he devised the distinction (see Leysens 2008; Devetak 2012: 116). Nonetheless, parallels exist (Devetak 2014: 424). Problem-­solving theories, such as Horkheimer’s traditional theories, are marked by two main characteristic theoretical tendencies: by a positivist methodology and by a tendency to legitimize prevailing social and political structures. Critical theories, again such as Horkheimer’s, oppose problem-­solving theories by rejecting both these theoretical tendencies (Devetak 2018: 111–115). Heavily influenced by the methodologies and philosophies of science, problem-solving theories suppose that positivism provides the only legitimate basis of knowledge. There are several characteristics that can be identified with positivism, but two are particularly relevant to our discussion. First, positivists assume that facts and values can be separated; second, that it is possible to separate the subjects and objects of knowledge. This results in the view not only that an objective world exists independently of human intellect, but also that objective knowledge of social reality is possible insofar as values are expunged from analysis. Problem-solving theory, as Cox (1981: 128) defines it, ‘takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action. It does not question the present order, but has the effect of legitimizing and reifying it.’ Its general aim, says Cox (1981: 129), is to make the existing order ‘work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble’. Neo-realism, qua problem-­ solving theory, takes seriously the realist dictum to work with, rather than against, prevailing international forces. By working within the given system it has a stabilizing effect, tending to preserve the existing global structure of social and political relations. Cox points out that neo-liberal institutionalism also partakes of problem solving. Its objective, as explained by its foremost exponent, is to ‘facilitate the smooth operation of decentralized international political systems’ (Keohane 1984: 63). Situating itself between the states system and the liberal capitalist global economy, neo-­ liberalism’s main concern is to ensure that the two systems function smoothly in their coexistence. It seeks to render the two global systems compatible and stable by diffusing any conflicts, tensions

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or crises that might arise between them (Cox 1992b: 173). As critical theorist James Bohman (2002: 506) says, such an approach ‘models the social scientist on the engineer, who masterfully chooses the optimal solution to a problem of design’. In summary, traditional conceptions of theory tend to work in favour of stabilizing prevailing structures of world order and their accompanying inequalities of power and wealth. The main point that Cox wishes to make about problem-solving theory is that its failure to reflect on the prior framework within which it theorizes means that it tends to operate in favour of prevailing ideological priorities. Its claims to value-neutrality notwithstanding, problem-solving theory is plainly ‘value-bound by virtue of the fact that it implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its own framework’ (Cox 1981: 130). As a consequence, it remains oblivious to the way power and interests precede and shape knowledge claims. By contrast, critical international theory starts from the conviction that because cognitive processes themselves are contextually situated and therefore subject to political interests, they ought to be critically evaluated. Theories of international factors, like any knowledge, are necessarily conditioned by social, cultural and ideological influence, and one of the main tasks of critical theory is to reveal the effect of this conditioning. As Richard Ashley (1981: 207) asserts, ‘knowledge is always constituted in reflection of interests’, so critical theory must bring to consciousness latent interests, commitments or values that give rise to, and orient, any theory. We must concede therefore that the study of international relations ‘is, and always has been, unavoidably normative’ (Neufeld 1995: 108), despite claims to the contrary. Because critical international theory sees an intimate connection between social life and cognitive processes, it rejects the positivist distinctions between fact and value, object and subject. By ruling out the possibility of objective knowledge, critical international theory seeks to promote greater ‘theoretical reflexivity’ (Neufeld 1995). Cox (1992a: 59) expresses this reflexivity in terms of a double process: the first is ‘self-consciousness of one’s own historical time and place which determines the questions that claim attention’; the second is ‘the effort to understand the historical dynamics that brought about the conditions in which these questions arose’. The reflexive form of critique is thus Janus-faced: it is directed outward to prevailing social structures and inward ‘against the limitations of thought itself’ (Levine 2012: 12). By adopting these reflexive attitudes, critical theory is more like a meta-theoretical attempt to examine how theories are situated in prevailing social and political orders, how this situatedness impacts on theorizing and, most importantly, the possibilities for theorizing in a manner that challenges the injustices and inequalities built into the prevailing world order. Critical theory’s relation to the prevailing order needs to be explained with some care. Critical theory does not ignore the prevailing order, but it does refuse to reify or fetishize it, that is, turn it into a valued institutional form independent of social forces and human agency. It accepts that humans do not make history under conditions of their own choosing, as Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1977e), and so a detailed examination of present conditions must necessarily be undertaken. Nevertheless, the order that has been ‘given’ to us is by no means natural, necessary or historically invariable. Critical international theory takes the global configuration of power relations as its object and asks how that configuration came about, what costs it brings with it and what alternatives remain immanent in history.

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Critical theory is essentially a critique of the dogmatism it finds in traditional modes of theorizing. This critique reveals the unexamined assumptions that guide traditional modes of thought and exposes the complicity of traditional modes of thought in prevailing political and social conditions. To break with dogmatic modes of thought is to ‘denaturalize’ the present, as Karin Fierke (1998: 13) puts it, to make us ‘look again, in a fresh way, at that which we assume about the world because it has become overly familiar’. Implicitly, therefore, critical theory qua denaturalizing critique serves ‘as an instrument for the delegitimisation of established power and privilege’ (Neufeld 1995: 14). The knowledge critical international theory generates is not neutral; it is ethically charged by an interest in social and political transformation. It criticizes and debunks theories that legitimize the prevailing order and affirms progressive alternatives that promote emancipation. This immediately raises the question of how ethical judgements about the prevailing world order can be formed. Since there are no objective theoretical frameworks, there can be no Archimedean standpoint outside history or society from which to engage in ethical criticism or judgement. It is not a matter of drafting a set of moral ideals and using them as a transcendent benchmark to judge forms of political organization. There is no utopia to compare with facts. This means that critical international theory must employ the method of immanent critique rather than abstract ethics to criticize the present order of things (Linklater 1990b: 22–23; Fierke 2007: ch. 8). The task, therefore, is to ‘start from where we are’, in Rorty’s words (quoted in Linklater 1998: 77), and excavate the principles and values that structure our political society, exposing the contradictions or inconsistencies in the way our society is organized to pursue its espoused values. This point is endorsed by several other critical international theorists, including Karin Fierke and Kimberly Hutchings. Immanent critique is undertaken in the absence of ‘an independently articulated method’ or ‘an ahistorical point of reference’ (Hutchings 1999: 99; Fierke 2007: 167). Following Hegel’s advice, critical international theory must acknowledge that the resources for criticizing and judging can be found only ‘immanently’, that is, in the already existing political societies from where the critique is launched. The critical resources brought to bear do not fall from the sky; they issue from the historical development of concrete legal and political institutions as well as intellectual and social movements. The task of the theorist is therefore to explain and criticize the present political order in terms of the principles presupposed by and embedded in its own legal, political and cultural practices and institutions (Fierke 1998: 114; Hutchings 1999: 102; Robinson 1999).

Critical Theory’s Task as an Emancipatory Theory If problem-solving theories adopt a positivist methodology and end up reaffirming the prevailing system, critical theories are informed by the traditions of hermeneutics and Ideologiekritik (ideology critique). Critical international theory is concerned not only with understanding and explaining the existing realities of world politics, it also intends to criticize and transform them. It is an attempt to comprehend global social processes for the purpose of inaugurating change, or at least knowing whether change is possible. In Hoffman’s words (1987: 233), it is ‘not merely an expression of the concrete realities of the historical situation, but also a force for change within those conditions’. Neufeld (1995: ch. 5) also affirms this view of critical theory. It offers, he says, a form of social criticism that supports practical political activity aimed at societal transformation.

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Key Concept: Emancipation Both a condition and a process of being released from a state of unfreedom or restraint. In political history emancipation has been associated with the liberation of slaves and the rights of women, among other movements. Emancipation  – as the

process and condition of being liberated from forms of oppression, domination, exclusion and injustice that prevail both within and across sovereign states – is the chief practical objective of critical theory.

Critical theory’s emancipatory interest is concerned with ‘securing freedom from unacknowledged constraints, relations of domination, and conditions of distorted communication and understanding that deny humans the capacity to make their future through full will and consciousness’ (Ashley 1981: 227). This plainly contrasts with problem-solving theories, which tend to accept what Linklater (1998: 21) calls the ‘immutability thesis’. Critical theory is committed to extending the rational, just and democratic organization of political life beyond the level of the state to the whole of humanity. The conception of emancipation promoted by critical international theory is largely inherited from a strand of thought that finds its origin in the Enlightenment project. This was generally concerned to break with past forms of injustice to foster the conditions necessary for universal freedom (Devetak 1995b). To begin with, emancipation, as understood by Enlightenment thinkers and critical international theorists, generally expresses a negative conception of freedom that consists of the removal of unnecessary, socially created constraints. This understanding is manifest in Booth’s (1991b: 539) definition of emancipation as ‘freeing people from those constraints that stop them carrying out what freely they would choose to do’. The emphasis in this understanding is on dislodging those impediments or impositions that unnecessarily curtail individual and collective freedom. Emancipation is a quest for autonomy, for self-determination (Linklater 1990b: 10, 135), but one that ‘cannot be gained at the expense of others’ (Fierke 2007: 188). It is also an open-ended ‘process rather than an end-point, a direction rather than a destination’ (Fierke 2007: 190). In Linklater’s account of critical international theory, two thinkers are integral: Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. Kant’s approach is instructive because it seeks to incorporate the themes of power, order and emancipation (Linklater 1990b: 21–22). As expressed by Linklater (1992b: 36), Kant ‘considered the possibility that state power would be tamed by principles of international order and that, in time, international order would be modified until it conformed with principles of cosmopolitan justice’. Kant’s reflections on international relations are an early attempt to map out a critique of international relations by absorbing the insights and criticizing the weaknesses – of what would later be called realist thought – under an interest in universal freedom and justice. While Linklater believes Marx’s approach to be too narrow in its focus on class-based exclusion, he thinks it nevertheless provides the basis of a social theory on which critical international theory must build. As Linklater observed (1990a: 159), both Marx and Kant share ‘the desire for a universal society of free individuals, a universal kingdom of ends’. Both held strong attachments to the Enlightenment themes of freedom and universalism, and both launched strong critiques of particularistic life-forms with the intention of expanding moral and political community. Critical international theory makes a strong case for paying closer attention to the relations between knowledge and interests. One of critical international theory’s main contributions in this

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regard is to expose the political nature of knowledge formation. Underlying all this is an explicit interest in challenging and removing socially produced constraints on human freedom, thereby contributing to the possible transformation of international relations (Linklater 1990b: 1; 1998) (Box 7.1).

Box 7.1 Post-Truth Politics and Critical Theory In an age of Wikileaks, ‘fake news’, Donald Trump and Brexit, the politics of knowledge has become a central feature of politics and international affairs. Critical theory has long been concerned with the politics of knowledge, but this has been primarily in terms of epistemology (how knowledge claims are validated) and in disclosing the interests (normative or otherwise) of underlying competing theories. These philosophical and theoretical concerns remain of great importance, but they are one step removed from the hyper-partisan politics in which emboldened governments and other actors willingly deceive the public through lying and dissimulation in pursuit of political objectives. Lying and dissimulation are nothing new in politics. Indeed, Hannah Arendt’s (1968: 251) judgement is that ‘Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues’. One needs only to think of the scandalous advice proffered by the Italian Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince: that a prince never lacks reasons to dissemble, deceive, or break a promise. Lest mendacity be consigned to distant history or defeated totalitarian regimes, it should be remembered that Arendt’s (1972) reflections on ‘Lying in Politics’ were prompted by the lies, deceptions and falsehoods of the Johnson presidency regarding the Vietnam War. Shortly thereafter, Richard Nixon resigned the office of President because of the Watergate scandal. Lying and other Machiavellian ‘dirty tricks’ have thus been integral to the politics of a country whose liberal-­democratic self-image is of a nation built on freedom and truth. In an age of internet technology and social media networks, the circulation of false information and conspiracy theories has ramped up considerably. The presidency of Donald Trump turned misinformation, dissimulation, untruth and lying into a political art form, exploiting what Arendt (1972: 17) called ‘the inherent contingency of facts’. Trump’s ability to exploit the inherent contingency of facts was amplified through his use of social media, Twitter especially, and his regular attacks on the media (Dietz 2018) and on knowledge and expertise (Calhoun 2019). This has cre-

ated an environment described by many commentators and academics as ‘post-truth politics’. This raises the question, what is the task of critical theory in the context of post-truth politics? Sebastian Schindler (2020: 377) argues that the main task for critique in a time of post-truth politics is ‘to problematize two defects: uncritical belief in truth claims, on the one hand, and the uncritical relativisation of all truth claims, on the other’. The first defect Schindler calls ‘naturalisation’, the belief that knowledge claims must be objective in the sense of being independent of power, interest or context. The second defect Schindler calls ‘relativisation’. This refers to the belief, common to critical theorists, feminists, post-structuralists and postcolonial theorists, that knowledge claims are always reflections of perspective, constituted by power and interest. While Schindler (2020: 382–383) does not deny the validity of this claim, he worries that reflexivity may lead to the denial of truth if scepticism towards facts is taken too far, making critique potentially ‘uncritical’. According to Schindler, naturalization and relativization have become fused together in post-truth politics, thereby allowing a key claim of critical theory to be used as a political weapon of obfuscation and falsehood. Kellyanne Conway’s notion of ‘alternative facts’ is an example of this fusion. Conway confected this term to defend the falsehood stated by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, that crowd numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President exceeded those at Barack Obama’s (see Zerilli 2020: 2). On the one hand, ‘alternative facts’ seems to appeal to the objective or unarguable character of facts; on the other hand, the insistence on different ways of seeing or expressing facts gives rise to alternative realities or relativized truths. As Arendt (1972: 17) reminds us, the political lie exploits ‘the inherent contingency of facts’. This is precisely what the Trump administration has done on this and countless other occasions (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/fact-­checker/ and https://www.politifact.

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com/). By intentionally misrepresenting facts, circulating conspiracy theories and making stuff up, the result is a deliberate blurring of the distinction between true and false. This is what Harry Frankfurt (2005) has conceptualized as ‘bullshit’. It is not so much the mendacious promulgation of a falsehood (i.e. a lie) as it is the deliberate confusion of truth and falsehood, the insistence that facts are fundamentally indeterminate (Frankfurt 2005: 61). The bullshitter, Frankfurt (2005: 56) continues, is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. Politics will always be a sphere of partisan disagreement and ideological difference; but it has never been deprived of techniques for revealing and demonstrating untruths and falsehoods. Critical theory, like any theory, possesses intellectual techniques for parsing truth claims. But the more salient point is to investigate the purposes or ends to which truth claims (whether false or not) are put. While it will always be important in politics to point out untruths and unmask mendacity, it is

equally important for critical theorists to examine how mendacity succeeds. Why is it that lies are taken for truths? How is the denial of evident truth achieved? Answers to these questions require contextual and historical analysis. What are the dominant ideological and partisan political positions and how are they mobilized behind truth claims or put into attack mode? What are the larger narratives that individuals use to frame or contest truth claims? In any context, as Martin Jay (2010) has argued, these broader question about the political society are crucial to understanding the ‘virtues’ and limits of mendacity. Early work by the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and Leo Lowenthal’s Prophets of Deceit (1949), provide critical theory with concepts to understand how the hyper-emotive rhetoric and invective of demagogues such as Donald Trump seek to manipulate public perceptions of reality through mendacity and bullshit. The purpose of this manipulation is to undermine trust in the prevailing institutions of democratic governance by sowing doubt, confusion and disorientation, and by demonizing political opponents and scapegoating minorities (Wolin 2016). While no amount of factchecking is likely to counter such a mendacious politics, critical theory’s task is to continue investigating and challenging the social and political bases on which mendacity and manipulation induce cynical mistrust in the institutions of democratic governance.

Rethinking Political Community Informing critical international theory is the spirit, if not the letter, of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Like Marx, critical international theorists seek to develop a social theory with emancipatory intent (Haacke 2005; Linklater 2007a: ch. 11). Since the mid-1990s, one of the core themes that has grown out of critical international theory is the need to develop more sophisticated understandings of community as a means of identifying and eliminating global constraints on humanity’s potential for freedom, equality and self-determination (Linklater 1990b: 7). Linklater’s approach to this task, which has set the agenda, is first, to analyse the way in which inequality and domination flow from modes of political community tied to the sovereign state; second, to develop a social theory of the states system; and third, to consider alternative forms of political community that promote human emancipation. This section elaborates the three dimensions on which critical international theory rethinks political community (see Linklater 1992a: 92–97). The first dimension is normative, and pertains to the philosophical critique of the state as an exclusionary form of political organization. The second is sociological, and relates to the need to develop an account of the origins and evolution

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of the modern state and states system and their accompanying harms. The third is the praxeological dimension concerning practical possibilities for reconstructing international relations along more emancipatory and cosmopolitan lines. The overall effect of critical international theory, and its major contribution to international relations, is to focus on the normative foundations of political life.

T he Normative Dimension: The Critique of Ethical Particularism and Social Exclusion One of the key philosophical assumptions that has structured political and ethical thought and practice about international relations is the idea that the modern state is the natural form of political community. The sovereign state has been ‘fetishized’, to use Marx’s term, as the normal mode of organizing political life. Critical international theorists, however, wish to problematize this fetishization and draw attention to the ‘moral deficits’ that are created by the state’s interaction with the capitalist world economy. In this section, I outline critical international theory’s philosophical inquiry into the normative bases of political life and its critique of ethical particularism and the social exclusion it generates. The philosophical critique of particularism was first, and most systematically, set out in Andrew Linklater’s Men and Citizens (1990a). His main concern was to trace how modern political thought had constantly differentiated ethical obligations due to co-citizens from those due to the rest of humanity. In practice, this tension between ‘men’ and ‘citizens’ has always been resolved in favour of citizens. Even if it was acknowledged, as it was by most early modern thinkers, that certain universal rights were thought to extend to all members of the human community, they were always residual and secondary to particularistic ones. Indeed, as Linklater (2007a: 182) observes, this tension has often been exploited for the purposes of devaluing the ‘suffering of distant strangers’ and sometimes even celebrating their suffering. Men and Citizens is, among other things, a work of recovery. It seeks to recover a political philosophy based on universal ethical reasoning that has been progressively marginalized in the 20th century, especially with the onset of the Cold War and the hegemony of realism. That is, it seeks to recover and reformulate the Stoic-Christian ideal of human community. While elements of this ideal can be found in the natural law tradition, it is to the Enlightenment tradition that Linklater turns to find a fuller expression of this ideal. Linklater here is strongly influenced by the thought of Kant, for whom war was undeniably related to the separation of humankind into separate, self-regarding political units; Rousseau, who caustically remarked that in joining a particular community individual citizens necessarily made themselves enemies of the rest of humanity; and Marx, who saw in the modern state a contradiction between general and private interests. The point being made here is that particularistic political associations lead to inter-societal estrangement, the perpetual possibility of war and social exclusion. This type of argument underlies the thought of several Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, Paine and Kant, for whom war was simply an expression of ancien régime politics. Marx extended the critique of the modern state by arguing that, in upholding the rule of law, private property and money, it masks capitalism’s alienation and exploitation behind bourgeois ideals of freedom and equality. Marx, of course, viewed the separation of politics and economics as a liberal illusion created to mask capitalism’s power relations. In Rupert’s words (2003: 182), one of Marx’s enduring insights is ‘that the seemingly apolitical economic spaces generated by

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capitalism – within and across juridical states – are permeated by structured relations of social power deeply consequential for political life’. From this Marxian perspective, modern international relations, insofar as they combine the political system of sovereign states and the economic system of market capitalism, are a form of exclusion where particular class interests parade themselves as universal. The problem with the sovereign state therefore is that as a ‘limited moral community’ it promotes exclusion, generating estrangement, injustice, insecurity and violent conflict between self-­regarding states by imposing rigid boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Cox 1981: 137; Linklater 1990a: 28). Such arguments have led in recent times, and especially after a century that saw genocides and unprecedented flows of stateless peoples and refugees, to more general and profound questions about the foundations on which humanity is politically divided and organized. In particular, as Hutchings (1999: 125) notes, it has led critical international theory to a ‘questioning of the nation-state as a normatively desirable mode of political organisation’. Consistent with other critical international theorists, Hutchings (1999: 122, 135) problematizes the ‘idealised fixed ontologies’ of nation and state. Hutchings goes further than Linklater, however, by also problematizing the individual ‘self’ of liberalism. Her intention is to examine the status of all normative claims to self-determination, whether the ‘self’ is understood as the individual, nation or state. But insofar as her critique is aimed at placing the ‘self’ in question as a self-contained entity, Hutchings’ analysis complements and extends the philosophical critique of particularism undertaken by Linklater. Richard Shapcott (2000b, 2001) also continues this critique by inquiring into the way different conceptions of the ‘self’ shape relations to ‘others’ in international relations. Shapcott’s main concern is with the possibility of achieving justice in a culturally diverse world. Although more influenced by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Tzvetan Todorov than Habermas, Shapcott’s critique of the self is consistent with Linklater’s and Hutchings’. He rejects both liberal and communitarian conceptions of the self for foreclosing genuine communication and justice in the relationship between self and other. Liberal conceptions of the self, he says, involve a ‘significant moment of assimilation’ because they are incapable of properly recognizing difference (2000b: 216). Communitarians, on the other hand, tend to take the limits of political community as given and, as a consequence, refuse to grant outsiders or non-citizens an equal voice in moral conversations. In other words, neither does justice to difference. Liberalism places too little moral significance on cultural or national difference, while communitarianism places too much moral significance on them (Shapcott 2001: ch. 1). The common project of Hutchings, Linklater and Shapcott here is to question the boundedness of identity. A less dogmatic attitude towards national boundaries is called for by these critical international theorists, as national boundaries are recognized as ‘neither morally decisive nor morally insignificant’ (Linklater 1998: 61). They are probably unavoidable in some form. The point, however, is to ensure that national boundaries do not obstruct principles of openness, recognition and justice in relations with the ‘other’ (Linklater 1998: ch. 2; Hutchings 1999: 138; Shapcott 2000a: 111), and, as Vassilios Paipais (2011) warns, that the relation to otherness does not relapse into assimilation. Critical international theory has highlighted the dangers of unchecked particularism, which can too readily deprive ‘outsiders’ of certain rights. This philosophical critique of particularism has led critical international theory to criticize the sovereign state as one of the foremost modern forms of social exclusion and therefore as a considerable barrier to universal justice and emancipation. In the

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following section, I outline critical international theory’s sociological account of how the modern state came to structure political community.

T he Sociological Dimension: States, Social Forces and Changing World Orders Rejecting realist claims that the condition of anarchy and the self-regarding actions of states are either natural or immutable, critical international theory has always been a form of small ‘c’ constructivism. One of its essential tasks is therefore to account for the social and historical production of both the agents and structures taken for granted by traditional theories. Against the positivism and empiricism of various forms of realism, critical international theory adopts a more hermeneutic approach, which conceives of social structures as having an inter-­ subjective existence. ‘Structures are socially constructed’ – that is, says Cox (1992a: 138), ‘they become a part of the objective world by virtue of their existence in the inter-subjectivity of relevant groups of people’. Allowing for the active role of human minds in the constitution of the social world does not lead to a denial of material reality, it simply gives it a different ontological status. Although social and political structures, as inter-subjective products, do not have a physical existence like tables or chairs, they nevertheless have real, concrete effects (1992b: 133). Structures produce concrete effects because humans act as if they were real (Cox 1986: 242). It is this view of ontology that underlies Cox’s and critical international theory’s attempts to comprehend the present order. In contrast to individualist ontologies, which conceive of states as atomistic, rational and possessive, and as if their identities existed prior to or independently of social interaction (Reus-Smit 1996: 100), critical international theory is more interested in explaining how both individual actors and social structures emerge in, and are conditioned by, history. For example, against the dogma that ‘the state is a state is a state’ (Cox 1981: 127), critical international theory views the modern state as a distinctive form of political community, bringing with it particular functions, roles and responsibilities that are socially and historically determined. Whereas the state is taken for granted by realism, critical international theory seeks to provide a social theory of the state. Crucial to critical international theory’s argument is that we must account for the development of the modern state as the dominant form of political community in modernity. What is therefore required is an account of how states construct their moral and legal duties and how these reflect certain assumptions about the structure and logic of international relations. Using the work of Michael Mann and Anthony Giddens in particular, Linklater (1998: chs. 4–5) undertakes what he calls an historical sociology of ‘bounded communities’. Linklater’s Beyond Realism and Marxism (1990b) had already begun to analyse the interplay of different logics or rationalization processes in the making of modern world politics. But in Transformation of Political Community (1998), he carried this analysis further by providing a more detailed account of these processes and by linking them more closely to systems of inclusion and exclusion in the development of the modern state. His argument is that the boundaries of political community are shaped by the interplay of four rationalization processes: state-building, geo-­ political rivalry, capitalist industrialization and moral-practical learning (Linklater 1998: 147–157). Five monopoly powers are acquired by the modern state through these rationalization processes. These powers, which are claimed by the sovereign state as indivisible, inalienable and exclusive rights, are the right to monopolize the legitimate means of violence over the claimed territory, the

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exclusive right to tax within this territorial jurisdiction, the right to demand undivided political allegiance, the sole authority to adjudicate disputes between citizens, and the sole subject of rights and representation under international law (1998: 28–29). The combining of these monopoly powers initiated what Linklater refers to as the ‘totalizing project’ of the modern Westphalian state. The upshot was to produce a conception of politics governed by the assumption that the boundaries of sovereignty, territory, nationality and citizenship must be coterminous (1998: 29, 44). The modern state concentrated these social, economic, legal and political functions around a single sovereign site of governance that became the primary subject of international relations by gradually removing alternatives. Of crucial concern to Linklater is how this totalizing project of the modern state modifies the social bond and consequently changes the boundaries of moral and political community. Though the state has been a central theme in the study of international relations, there has been little attempt to account for the changing ways that states determine principles that, by binding citizens into a community, separate them from the rest of the world. Linklater’s focus on the changing nature of social bonds has much in common with Cox’s (1999) focus on the changing relationship between state and civil society. The key to rethinking international relations, according to Cox, lies in examining the relationship between state and civil society, and thereby recognizing that the state takes different forms, not only in different historical periods, but also within the same period. Lest it be thought that critical international theory is simply interested in producing a theory of the state alone, it should be remembered that the state is but one force that shapes the present world order. Cox (1981: 137–138) argues that a comprehensive understanding of the present order and its structural characteristics must account for the interaction between social forces, states and world orders. Within Cox’s approach the state plays an ‘intermediate though autonomous role’ between, on the one hand, social forces shaped by production, and on the other, a world order that embodies a particular configuration of power determined by the states system and the world economy (1981: 141). There are two fundamental and intertwined presuppositions upon which Cox founds his theory of the state. The first reflects the Marxist–Gramscian axiom that ‘World orders … are grounded in social relations’ (Cox 1983: 173). This means that observable changes in military and geopolitical balances can be traced to fundamental changes in the relationship between capital and labour. The second presupposition stems from Vico’s argument that institutions such as the state are historical products. The state cannot be abstracted from history as if its essence could be defined or understood as prior to history (Cox 1981: 133). The end result is that the definition of the state is enlarged to encompass ‘the underpinnings of the political structure in civil society’ (Cox 1983: 164). The influence of the church, press, education system, culture and so on has to be incorporated into an analysis of the state, as these ‘institutions’ help to produce the attitudes, dispositions and behaviours consistent with, and conducive to, the state’s arrangement of power relations in society. Thus the state, which comprises the machinery of government, plus civil society, constitutes and reflects the ‘hegemonic social order’ (1983). This hegemonic social order must also be understood as a dominant configuration of ‘material power, ideology and institutions’ that shapes forms of world order (Cox 1981: 141). The key issue for Cox, therefore, is how to account for the transition from one world order to another. He devotes much of his attention to explaining ‘how structural transformations have come about in the past’ (Cox 1986: 244). For example, he has analysed in some detail the structural

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transformation that took place in the late 19th century from a period characterized by craft manufacture, the liberal state and pax Britannica to a period characterized by mass production, the emerging welfare-­nationalist state and imperial rivalry (Cox 1987). In much of his recent writing, Cox has been preoccupied with the restructuring of world order brought about by globalization. In brief, Cox and his colleague Stephen Gill have offered extensive examinations of how the growing global organization of production and finance is transforming Westphalian conceptions of society and polity. At the heart of this current transformation is what Cox calls the ‘internationalization of the state’, whereby the state becomes little more than an instrument for restructuring national economies so that they are more responsive to the demands and disciplines of the capitalist global economy. This has allowed the power of capital to grow – ‘relative to labour and in the way it reconstitutes certain ideas, interests, and forms of state’ – and given rise to a neo-liberal ‘business civilization’ (Gill 1995, 1996: 210; see also Cox 1993, 1994). Drawing upon Karl Polanyi, Cox and Gill see the social purposes of the state being subordinated to the market logics of capitalism, disembedding the economy from society and producing a complex world order of increasing tension between principles of territoriality and interdependence (Cox 1993: 260–263; Gill 1996). Some of the consequences of this economic globalization are, as Cox (1999) and Gill (1996) note, the polarization of rich and poor, increasing anomie, a stunted civil society and, as a result, the rise of exclusionary populism (extreme right, xenophobic and racist movements). The point of reflecting on changing world orders, as Cox (1999: 4) notes, is to ‘serve as a guide to action designed to change the world so as to improve the lot of humanity in social equity’. So it is with the express purpose of analysing the potential for structural transformations in world order that critical international theory identifies and examines ‘emancipatory counter-hegemonic’ forces. Counter-hegemonic forces could be states, such as a coalition of ‘Third World’ states that struggles to undo the dominance of ‘core’ countries, or the ‘counter-hegemonic alliance of forces on the world scale’, such as trade unions, non-governmental organizations and new social movements, which grow from the ‘bottom up’ in civil society (Cox 1999; Maiguaschca 2003; Eschle and Maiguaschca 2005). The point of critical international theory’s various sociological analyses is to illuminate how already existing social struggles might lead to decisive transformations in the normative bases of global political life. This has prompted Linklater (2002a, 2011c) to undertake an ambitious three-­ volume study of the problem of harm in world politics. Linklater’s objective in the first volume is to theorize harm by setting the foundations for sociologically informed historical enquiries in subsequent projected volumes. ‘A central aim of the overall project’, Linklater (2011c: 5) explains, ‘is to understand whether, or how far, the modern world has made progress in making harm a key moral and political question for humanity as a whole’. In the second volume, Linklater (2016) compares Western states systems across time on the basis of how they conceptualize international and transnational harms, and traces the historical development of socialized standards of restraint. What kinds of harm are generated in particular states systems, and to what extent are rules and norms against harm built into them? Central to this study are the concepts of civility, civilization and ‘civilizing processes’ developed in the writings of Norbert Elias. Linklater brings these concepts into dialogue with Martin Wight’s comparative sociology of states systems to investigate the extent to which changing attitudes to violence and suffering have generated greater sensitivity towards emotions such as embarrassment, guilt, shame and disgust (Linklater 2016).

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Whatever the civilizing gains may have been made by the modern states system, de-civilizing threats persist. Though there have been different responses to the terrorist attacks perpetrated by al-Qaeda, Linklater (2002b, 2007b) was concerned that the dominant White House rhetoric of a civilizational war against evil and relaxation of the global anti-torture norm threatened to unleash ‘de-civilizing’ potentials. The US-led ‘war on terrorism’, by privileging military means, putting more innocent lives at risk, suspending the rule of international law and employing ‘constitutional torture’, raised the question of ‘whether the vision of a world in which fewer human beings are burdened with preventable suffering has been dealt a blow from which it will not easily recover’ (Linklater 2002b: 304). Implicit in Linklater, and explicit in the writings of others, is the argument that the greatest threat to world order may not be the terrorists who perpetrated such inexcusable harm, but the reaction by the United States. By placing itself outside the rules, norms and institutions of international society in its prosecution of its war on terrorism, the United States was not only diminishing the prospects of a peaceful and just world order, but undermining the very ‘civilizing’ principles and practices on which it was founded (Habermas 2003a, 2006; Devetak 2005; Booth and Dunne 2011).

The Praxeological Dimension: Cosmopolitanism and Discourse Ethics One of the main intentions behind a sociology of the states system is to assess the possibility of dismantling the modern state’s totalizing project and moving towards more open, inclusive forms of community. This reflects critical international theory’s belief that while totalizing projects have been tremendously successful, they have not been complete in colonizing modern political life. They have not been able to ‘erode the sense of moral anxiety when duties to fellow-citizens clash with duties to the rest of humankind’ (Linklater 1998: 150–151). In this section, I outline critical international theory’s attempt to rethink the meaning of community in the light of this residual moral anxiety and an accumulating ‘moral capital’ that deepens and extends cosmopolitan citizenship. This involves not simply identifying the forces working to dismantle practices of social exclusion, but also identifying those working to supplant or at least supplement the system of sovereign states with cosmopolitan structures of global governance. For Thomas Diez and Jill Steans (2005: 132), this means facilitating institutional developments that concretize the dialogic ideal; for Rodger Payne and Nayef Samhat (2004: 9), it means ‘incorporating procedural norms of participation (or inclusion) and transparency (or openness)’ into international regimes; for Hauke Brunkhorst and Habermas, it means facilitating ‘global governance without global government’ and ‘post-national democracies without post-national states’ (Scheuerman 2008, 2011).

Key Concept: Cosmopolitanism An ethico-political theory emphasizing an individuals’ or community’s obligations to all other human beings. Often counterposed to communitarianism, it rejects the state-centric view that moral obligations must be confined to the political borders of a com-

munity. While cosmopolitanism does not deny local or national attachments and the obligations fostered there, it is sceptical of the exclusive and exclusionary nature of these attachments. It has become a central normative feature of critical theory in IR.

Linklater’s work forms the most sustained and extensive interrogation of political community in international relations. In Transformation of Political Community (1998), Linklater elaborates his

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argument in terms of a ‘triple transformation’ affecting political community. The three transformational tendencies Linklater identifies are a progressive recognition that moral, political and legal principles ought to be universalized, an insistence that material inequality ought to be reduced and greater demands for deeper respect for cultural, ethnic and gender differences. The triple transformation identifies processes that open the possibility of dismantling the nexus between sovereignty, territory, citizenship and nationalism and moving towards more cosmopolitan forms of governance. In this respect, the praxeological dimension closes the circle with the normative dimension by furthering the critique of the modern state’s particularism. However, we should note a slight revision of this critique. Modern states are not just too particularistic for Linklater’s liking, they are also too universalistic (Linklater 1998: 27). He here finesses his earlier critique of particularism by acknowledging the feminist and post-structuralist arguments that universalism runs the risk of ignoring or repressing certain marginalized or vulnerable groups unless it respects legitimate differences. Nonetheless, it remains consistent with the Enlightenment critique of the system of sovereign states, and the project to universalize the sphere in which human beings treat each other as free and equal. If critical international theory’s overall objective is to promote the reconfiguration of political community, not just by expanding political community beyond the frontiers of the sovereign state, but also by deepening it within those frontiers, then it must offer a more complex, multi-tiered structure of governance. Ultimately, it depends on reconstituting the state within alternative frameworks of political action that reduce the impact of social exclusion and enlarge democratic participation (see also Jurkevics and Benhabib 2018). The key to realizing this vision is to sever the link between sovereignty and political association that is integral to the Westphalian system (Devetak 1995b: 43). A post-exclusionary form of political community would, according to Linklater, be post-sovereign or post-Westphalian. It would abandon the idea that power, authority, territory and loyalty must be focused on a single community or monopolized by a single site of governance. The state can no longer mediate effectively or exclusively among the many loyalties, identities and interests that exist in a globalizing world (see Devetak 2003). Fairer and more complex mediations can be developed, argues Linklater (1998: 60, 74), only by transcending the ‘destructive fusion’ achieved by the modern state and promoting wider communities of dialogue. The overall effect would thus be to ‘de-centre’ the state in the context of a more cosmopolitan form of political organization. This requires states to establish and locate themselves in overlapping forms of international society. Linklater (1998: 166–167) lists three forms: first, a pluralist society of states in which the principles of co-existence work ‘to preserve respect for the freedom and equality of independent political communities’; second, a ‘solidarist’ society of states that have agreed to substantive moral purposes; third, a post-Westphalian framework where states relinquish some of their sovereign powers so as to institutionalize shared political and moral norms (see Habermas 2006). These alternative frameworks of international society would widen the boundaries of political community by increasing the impact that duties to ‘outsiders’ have on decision-making processes and contribute to what Linklater (1998) and Shapcott (2001) call ‘dialogical cosmopolitanism’. Linklater and Shapcott make the case for what they refer to as ‘thin cosmopolitanism’. This would need to promote universal claims yet do justice to difference (Shapcott 2000b, 2001). Within such a set-up, loyalties to the sovereign state or any other political association cannot be absolute (Linklater 1998: 56). In recognizing the diversity of social bonds and moral ties, a ‘thin cosmopolitan’ ethos seeks to multiply the types and levels of political community (for critical

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engagements with Linklater’s ‘thin cosmopolitanism’, see Geras 1999 and Walker 1999). It should be noted, however, that this does not mean that duties to humanity override all others. There is no fixed ‘moral hierarchy’ within a ‘thin cosmopolitan’ framework (Linklater 1998: 161–168, 193– 198). This version of ‘thin cosmopolitanism’ places the ideals of dialogue and consent at the centre of its project, and, to use Habermas’s (2006) language, seeks to juridify, rather than moralize, international relations. That is, Habermas’s cosmopolitan critical international theory wants to extend the progressive ‘constitutionalization of international law’ so as to realize a ‘global domestic politics without a world government’ (Habermas 2006: 135–137). The purpose of this multilevel global framework would be limited to securing international peace and protecting human rights (Habermas 2006: ch. 8; see also Beardsworth 2011: 32–40; 2015). Another version of cosmopolitanism has been advanced, individually and collectively, by David Held and Daniele Archibugi (Archibugi and Held 1995; Archibugi 2002, 2004a). Their work stems from an appreciation of the dangers and opportunities globalization presents to democracy. It seeks to globalize democracy even as it democratizes globalization (Archibugi 2004a: 438). The thrust of cosmopolitan democracy is captured by the question Archibugi asks (2002: 28): ‘Why must the principles and rules of democracy stop at the borders of a political community?’ As he explains, it is not simply a matter of ‘replicating, sic et simpliciter, the model we are acquainted with across a broader sphere’ (2002: 29). It is a matter of strengthening the rule of law and citizens’ participation in political life through differentiated forms of democratic engagement. Archibugi (2004b) has gone so far as to outline cosmopolitan principles governing humanitarian intervention. This controversial proposal stems from post-Cold War developments and a growing willingness on the part of international society to suspend sovereignty when extreme, large-scale cases of human suffering occur. Though difficult practical questions remain about ‘who is authorized to decide when a humanitarian intervention is needed’, Archibugi (2004b) strongly rejects the idea that states can unilaterally intervene under the humanitarian cause (see also Devetak 2002, 2007).

Dialogue and Discourse Ethics In this final section, I outline briefly how the emphasis on dialogue is utilized in critical international theory. Linklater employs Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics as a model for his dialogical approach. Discourse ethics is essentially a deliberative, consent-oriented approach to resolving political issues within a moral framework. As elaborated by Habermas (1984b: 99), discourse ethics builds upon the need for communicating subjects to account for their beliefs and actions in terms that are intelligible to others and that they can then accept or contest. It is committed to the Kantian principle that political decisions or norms must be generalizable and consistent with the normative demands of public scrutiny if they are to attain legitimacy. At such moments when an international principle, social norm or institution loses legitimacy, or when consensus breaks down, then ideally discourse ethics enters the fray as a means of consensually deciding upon new principles or institutional arrangements. According to discourse ethics, newly arrived at political principles, norms or institutional arrangements can be said to be valid only if they can meet with the approval of all those who would be affected by them (Habermas 1993: 151). There are three features worthy of note for our purposes. First, discourse ethics are inclusionary. It is oriented to the establishment and maintenance of the conditions necessary for open and

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non-exclusionary dialogue. No individual or group that will be affected by the principle, norm or institution under deliberation should be excluded from participation in dialogue. Second, discourse ethics are democratic. It builds on a model of the public sphere that is bound to democratic deliberation and consent, where participants employ an ‘argumentative rationality’ for the purpose of ‘reaching a mutual understanding based on a reasoned consensus, challenging the validity claims involved in any communication’ (Risse 2000: 1–2). Combining the inclusionary and democratic impulses, discourse ethics provide a method that can test which principles, norms or institutional arrangements would be ‘equally good for all’ (Habermas 1993: 151). Third, discourse ethics are a form of moral-practical reasoning. As such, it is not simply guided by utilitarian calculations or expediency, nor is it guided by an imposed concept of the ‘good life’; rather, it is guided by procedural fairness. It is more concerned with the method of justifying moral principles than with the substantive content of those principles. It is possible to identify three general implications of discourse ethics for the reconstruction of world politics, which can only be briefly outlined here. First, by virtue of its consent-oriented, deliberative approach, discourse ethics offers procedural guidance for democratic decision-making processes. In light of social and material changes brought about by the globalization of production and finance, the movement of peoples, the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples and other sub-national and transnational groups, environmental degradation and so on, the ‘viability and accountability of national decision-making entities’ is being brought into question (Held 1993: 26). Held highlights the democratically deficient nature of the sovereign state when he asks: ‘Whose consent is necessary and whose participation is justified in decisions concerning, for instance, AIDS, or acid rain, or the use of non-renewable resources? What is the relevant constituency: national, regional or international?’ (1993: 26–27). Under globalizing conditions, it is apt that discourse ethics raises questions not only about who is to be involved in decision-making processes, but also how and where these decisions are to be made. The key here, in Linklater’s (1999: 173) words, is ‘to develop institutional arrangements that concretize the dialogic ideal’ at all levels of social and political life; or, as Jim George and Stephen Rosow (2015) argue, to develop ‘new democratic imaginaries’ that respond to the specific conditions and struggles against neoliberal globalization, corrupt and oppressive regimes, and other forms of domination and exclusion. Seyla Benhabib (2011, 2016) has argued along similar lines, suggesting that cosmopolitan democracy can be strengthened through the globalization of transnational human rights. This directs attention to an emerging global or international public sphere, where ‘social movements, non-state actors and ‘global citizens’ join with states and international organizations in a dialogue over the exercise of power and authority across the globe’ (Devetak and Higgott 1999: 491). As Marc Lynch (1999, 2000) has shown, this network of overlapping, transnational publics not only seeks to influence the foreign policy of individual states, but it also seeks to change international relations by modifying the structural context of strategic interaction. The existence of a global public sphere ensures that, as Risse (2000: 21) points out, ‘actors have to regularly and routinely explain and justify their behaviour’. Neta Crawford (2009) has corroborated this argument by demonstrating that ‘talk’, as the dominant characteristic of world politics, has contributed to further institutionalization and the growth of venues where argument and persuasion may take the place of coercive force. In other words, the institutionalization of talk – arguing, persuading and other forms of communicative action – enables global governance institutions to attain greater legitimacy by providing ‘voice opportunities to various stakeholders’ and improved

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‘problem-­ solving capacity’ through deliberation (Risse 2004). The growing interest in Axel Honneth’s work on ‘struggles for recognition’ is salient here. Jürgen Haacke (2005), Martin Weber (2007) and Shannon Brincat (2013, 2017) have argued convincingly that Honneth’s account of the sources of social conflict, social identity and solidarity may be fruitfully explored for the study of international relations. His approach offers one way of thinking about how experiences of denigration, domination and exclusion may spur struggles for recognition that carry inherent moral claims. As Weber (2014: 532) put it, these struggles, which grow out of the actual experiences of the excluded and dominated, have ‘normative substance’. Second, discourse ethics offer a procedure for regulating violent conflict and arriving at resolutions that are acceptable to all affected parties. The cosmopolitan democratic procedures are geared towards removing harm from international relations as far as possible. The invasion of Iraq by the United States and United Kingdom in March 2003 led Habermas (2003a: 369) to pronounce that ‘multilateral will-formation in interstate relations is not simply one option among others’. By giving up its role as guarantor of international rights, violating international law and disregarding the United Nations, Habermas (2003a: 365) says, ‘the normative authority of the United States of America lies in ruins’. Even though the fall of a brutal regime is a great political good, Habermas condemned the war and rejected comparisons with the Kosovo war to which he and other critical theorists lent their qualified support as a humanitarian intervention. Habermas’s reasons for condemning the Iraq war were that it failed to satisfy any of the criteria of discourse ethics. Not only did the United States and United Kingdom base their arguments on questionable intelligence, but they also contravened established norms of dispute resolution and showed a less than convincing commitment to ‘truth-seeking’ aimed at mutual understanding and reasoned consensus. Third, discourse ethics offers a means of criticizing and justifying the principles by which humanity organizes itself politically. By reflecting on the principles of inclusion and exclusion, discourse ethics can reflect on the normative foundations and institutions that govern global political life. From the moral point of view contained within discourse ethics, the sovereign state as a form of community is unjust because the principles of inclusion and exclusion are not the outcome of open dialogue and deliberation where all who stand to be affected by the arrangement have been able to participate in discussion. Against the exclusionary nature of the social bond underlying the sovereign state, discourse ethics has the inclusionary aim ‘to secure the social bond of all with all’ (Habermas 1987: 346). In a sense, it is an attempt to put into practice Kant’s ideal of a community of co-legislators embracing the whole of humanity (Linklater 1998: 84–89). As Linklater (1998: 10) argues, ‘all humans have a prima facie equal right to take part in universal communities of discourse which decide the legitimacy of global arrangements’. In sum, discourse ethics promotes a cosmopolitan ideal where the political organization of humanity is decided by a process of unconstrained and unrestricted dialogue.

Conclusion There can be little doubt that critical theory has made a major contribution to international relations theory since its emergence in the early 1980s. One of these contributions has been to heighten awareness of the link between knowledge and politics. Critical international theory rejects the idea of the theorist as objective observer or detached bystander. Instead, the theorist is enmeshed in

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social and political life, and theories of international relations, like all theories, are informed by prior interests and convictions, whether they are acknowledged or not. A second contribution critical international theory makes is to rethink accounts of the modern state and political community. Traditional theories tend to take the state for granted, but critical international theory analyses the changing ways in which the boundaries of community are formed, maintained and transformed. It not only provides a sociological account, but it also provides a sustained normative analysis of the practices of inclusion and exclusion. Critical theory’s aim of achieving an alternative theory and practice of international relations rests on the possibility of overcoming the exclusionary dynamics and crises associated with the modern system of sovereign states and establishing a cosmopolitan set of arrangements that will better promote peace, freedom, justice, equality and security across the globe. It is thus an attempt to rethink the normative foundations of international relations for the purpose of enhancing a global emancipatory politics. Key Concepts Emancipation: Both a condition and a process of being released from a state of unfreedom or restraint. In political history, emancipation has been associated with the liberation of slaves and the rights of women, among other movements. Emancipation  – as the process and condition of being liberated from forms of oppression, domination, exclusion and injustice that prevail both within and across sovereign states  – is the chief practical objective of critical theory. Frankfurt School: The name given to an émigré group of German social theorists and philosophers, led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno among others, who were associated with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt before emigrating to the USA during the Nazi regime. Pioneering a form of social theory influenced by German idealism (Kant

and Hegel) and historical materialism (Marxism), they developed a theory aimed at challenging prevailing social, political and economic structures in an effort to emancipate humanity from unjust forms of domination and exclusion. It is the Frankfurt School that is the chief intellectual influence for critical theory in IR. Cosmopolitanism: An ethico-political theory emphasizing an individual’s or community’s obligations to all other human beings. Often counterposed to communitarianism, it rejects the state-­centric view that moral obligations must be confined to the political borders of a community. While cosmopolitanism does not deny local or national attachments and the obligations fostered there, it is sceptical of the exclusive and exclusionary nature of these attachments. It has become a central normative feature of critical theory in IR.

Glossary Fetishization: The fascination with or devotion to an object. A concept used initially by Karl Marx to describe the way capitalism ascribes value to things rather than human relationships. Immanent critique: A form of critique that denies the possibility of a normative or intellectual standpoint outside history. Instead, it measures and criticizes the present order of things by using concepts and ideals promoted by that system.

Instrumental rationality: A form of reason oriented to the domination of nature and others. Usually associated with neo-realism and positivist modes of knowledge.

Problem-solving theory: A form of theory that takes the world and its prevailing social and power relations as it finds it, and whose aim is to make the present system function more smoothly by

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eliminating sources of disruption. Usually associated with the realist, neo-realist and neo-liberal theories of IR.

Further Reading Brincat, S., Lima, L. and Nunes, J. (eds.) (2012) Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies (London: Routledge). Devetak, R. (2018) Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hutchings, K. (2008) Time and World Politics Thinking the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Levine, D.  J. (2012) Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Linklater, A. (2016) Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Roach, Steven, C. (2010) Critical Theory of International Politics: Complementarity, Justice and Governance (London: Routledge).

FEMINISM(S) JACQUI TRUE

8

Breaking with the powerful bond among men, states and war, feminist theories of international relations have flourished since the mid-1980s. These theories have introduced gender as an empirical category and analytical tool for understanding global power relations as well as a normative approach with which to consider alternative world orders. The concept of gender challenges the notion that people’s identities, roles and relationships are fixed or determined by nature. It views masculinities and femininities, the roles of women, men and those who do not identify with binary roles as well as the relationships among them to be socially constructed and changeable rather than biologically determined. This chapter, however, while interrogating the binary construction of gender in international relations (and briefly discussing queer theory), focuses on men/women, and does not pursue the question of trans/intersex identities that undoubtedly have implications for IR.  Like constructivism, critical theory, post-modernism, postcolonial and Green theories, feminisms shift the study of international relations away from a singular focus on inter-state relations towards a broader analysis of transnational actors and structures, and their transformations. But with their focus on non-state actors, marginalized peoples and alternative conceptualizations of power and relationships, feminist perspectives bring fresh thinking and action to world politics. Key Concept: Gender Masculine and feminine identities, attributes, constraints and opportunities associated with being male and female. These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and learned through socialization within social structures, institutions and cultural sym-

bolism. They are context/time-specific and changeable. Gender relations are integral to power relations within and across societies; they determine what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man or collective institutions in any given context.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made gender-differentiated health and economic impacts ­globally, highly visible. Gender differences in leadership responses to the crisis have received widespread commentary, with women state leaders in New Zealand, Germany and Norway among others responsible for implementing some of the most effective COVID-19 responses and facilitating descriptive, compelling and relatable communication with their citizens (True and Davies 2020). Other major global events, such as the 2008 global financial crisis, have expanded International Political Economy scholarship to interrogate prevailing economic structures and the financialization of the global political economy through a critical feminist lens (Elias and Roberts 2018; True and Hozić 2020). Likewise, the War on Terror that followed the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11) led to research 141

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on gender and international security (see Al-Ali and Pratt 2009a; Sjoberg 2010), including feminist security studies analysis of the gendered impacts of war and peace, and quantitative analysis using gender as a variable to explain aspects of state behaviour and international conflict (Hudson et al. 2008, 2012; Shepherd 2007; Wibben 2011). With this growth and range of gender and International Relations scholarship, feminists have over the last decade given explicit accounts of their approaches to researching global politics (Ackerly et al. 2006; Wibben 2016). The chapter starts with a brief overview of the development of feminist International Relations. It differentiates three overlapping aspects of IR feminist scholarship that rather than denoting feminist theories per se (as in liberal feminism, socialist feminism, etc.) represent a useful heuristic for discussing their varied contributions to international relations theory. These are: (1) empirical feminism, which focuses on making visible women’s agency and/or exploring gender relations as part of international relations; (2) analytical feminism, which uses gender as a theoretical category to reveal the gender bias and subjectivity of International Relations concepts as well as to explain the social construction of international relations; and (3) normative feminism, which reflects on how we know and theorize gender in international relations and the role of scholarship in a normative agenda for global social change in which the achievement of gender equality is integral. These three types of contribution to IR theory may be informed by diverse and specific feminist theories such as, feminist political economy, feminist institutionalism, and poststructural feminism. For example, Kyrstalli et al. (2018), in their study on the global migration crisis at Europe’s borders, draw on critical and post-structuralist feminist theories to make an empirical contribution to theorizing gendered international relations. They challenge the feminization of refugees in conventional analyses by looking beyond female refugee subjects and their experiences of physical violence to analyse the role of gendered kinship, hierarchies, networks and transactions in the refugee journey affecting male refugee experiences and those whose journeys are not family-oriented. Empirical, analytical and normative aspects of feminisms challenge the assumptions of other theories of International Relations and help to construct new constitutive theories of global politics.

 aves of Feminisms and Generations of Feminist W International Relations Until the 1980s, the field of International Relations studied the causes of war and conflict and the global expansion of trade and commerce with no particular reference to people. Indeed, the use of abstract categories such as ‘the state’, ‘the system’, strategic security discourses such as nuclear deterrence and positivist research approaches effectively removed people as agents embedded in social and historical contexts from theories of international relations. This is ironic since the scholarly field emerged, following the end of the First World War, to democratize foreign policymaking and empower people as citizen-subjects rather than mere objects of elite statecraft (Hill 1999). So where does the study of people called ‘women’ and ‘men’ or the social construction of masculine and feminine genders fit within International Relations? How are the international system and the study of International Relations gendered? To what extent do feminist perspectives help us to explain, understand and improve global politics? This chapter explores these questions as they have been addressed by a diverse community of feminist scholars in and outside the International Relations field.

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Transformations in the structure of international relations have greatly altered patterns of gender relations just as gender dynamics have influenced processes of militarization, economic globalization and foreign policymaking (see Gray et al. 2006). If the first wave of feminist movements in Western democracies in the early part of the 20th century mobilized women’s equal access to the public sphere of civil and political rights, and the second wave of these feminist social movements in the 1960s and 1970s across the world struggled to make visible inequalities between men and women in the private sphere that shape public economic and political inequalities, then within the International Relations discipline feminists have built on both waves to argue that ‘the personal which is political’ is also ‘international’. In Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (1989 [2014]), Cynthia Enloe exposed how international politics frequently involves intimate relationships, personal identities and private lives. These informal politics are less transparent, less straightforward to study methodologically than the stuff of official politics. Taking the view from ‘below’, feminists have sought to demonstrate that gender relations are an integral part of international relations. Diplomatic spouses smooth over the workings of power among states and statesmen (sic); opaque but trustworthy marital and social contracts have historically facilitated empire-building, and in contemporary politics they facilitate transnational money laundering and sex trafficking; global media icons such as the Kardashians conquer foreign cultures and prepare them for the onslaught of Western capitalism; and people organize in kitchens, churches and kin-communities to overthrow authoritarian regimes and make peace in the face of brutal conflict (Domett 2005; Al-Ali and Pratt 2009b; Murdie and Peksen 2014; Ali 2018). The view from ‘above’ is also increasingly gender-aware, in part owing to the advocacy of gender equality norms in international and state institutions. Focusing on politics at the margins dispels the assumption that power is what comes out of the barrel of a gun or ensues from the declarations of world leaders. Indeed, feminist efforts to reinterpret power suggest that International Relations scholars have underestimated the pervasiveness of power and precisely what it takes, at every level and every day, to reproduce a grossly uneven and hierarchical world order (Enloe 1997). Feminist reconceptualizations of power and attention to the margins of global politics have allowed International Relations scholars to recognize and comprehend new political phenomena and, importantly, from new angles, the experience of non-­ elites. For example, the prolific global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment arose from the work of Black feminist activist Tarana Burke, whose efforts to raise awareness of the pervasiveness sexual violence towards women and girls led to her and other feminist ‘silence breakers’ being crowned Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2017 (see True 2021). Generations are a useful heuristic for thinking through shifts in IR feminisms, indicating rather than defining a chronology. A first generation of feminist IR in the late 1980s challenged the conventional focus of the field, engaging in the ‘third debate’ about the impossibility of objectivity in the study of international relations and the embeddedness of scholarship in global power relations discussed in the Introduction, Chapter 11 (constructivism) and Chapter 10 (post-structuralism). In this debate, feminist scholars contested the exclusionary, state-centric and positivist nature of the discipline primarily at a meta-theoretical level. Many of these feminist contributions sought to deconstruct and subvert realism, the dominant ‘power politics’ explanation of post-war international relations (see Walt 2020). Often implicit in their concern with gender relations was the assumption of a feminist standpoint epistemology (see Harding 1986). Such a standpoint maintains that women’s lives on the margins of world politics provides a more critical and

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comprehensive understanding of international relations than the objectivist view of the realist theorist or foreign policy lens of the statesman since they are less biased by existing institutions and elite power (Keohane 1989: 245; Sylvester 1994a: 13; see also Tickner 1992; Tanyag and True 2019). These first-generation feminist challenges opened the space for critical International Relations scholarship, but they left open what a feminist perspective on world politics would look like substantively and how distinctive it would be (Zalewski 1995). Now more than three decades after the first journal in the field devoted a special issue to ‘women and international relations’ (Millennium 1988), this question is less challenging to answer, although there is no unequivocal feminist International Relations perspective. Most courses on International Relations theory worldwide now consider gender issues or feminist perspectives owing to the publication of a growing number of texts and monographs by feminist International Relations scholars (Shepherd 2010; Sjoberg 2010; Duncanson 2016; Berry 2018; Parashar et al. 2018; Davies and True 2019b). While most disciplinary journals publish articles and special issues on the subjects of women, gender and feminism in international relations, there are now several standalone journals specifically devoted to feminist scholarship on these themes, including International Feminist Journal of Politics (established 1999), Politics & Gender (established in 2005), Gender and Development (established in 1993) and the European Journal of Politics and Gender (established in 2018). A second generation of feminist research developed feminist International Relations by making gender and the study of masculinities a central analytic category in studies of foreign policy, security and global political economy that explore a range of historical and geographical contexts (Hooper 1998; Parpart and Zalewski 2008; Montoya 2015; Karim and Beardsley 2017; Bashevkin 2018), while a third generation has explored the intersections of feminisms with queer theory and postcolonialism (see Chapter 4) (Weber 2016; Parashar et al. 2018; Behl 2019; Medie 2020). Often analysing the intersection of gender identity, class, race, colonialism, nationality and immigrant status, ethnicity and sexuality, second- and third-generation feminist scholarship is closely tied to developments in feminist post-positivist and interpretivist methodologies for IR. The following section explores further the empirical aspect of feminist theories of International Relations and illustrates their fresh insight into the complex gendered dynamics of global politics.

Empirical Feminism Empirical feminism turns our attention to women and gender relations as key dimensions of international relations. Feminist challenges to International Relations contend that women’s lives and experiences have been, and still are, often excluded from the study of international relations. This ‘sexist’ exclusion has resulted in research that presents only a partial, masculine view in a field in which the dominant theories claim to explain ‘the reality’ of world politics (Halliday 1988b). Empirical feminism corrects the denial or misrepresentation of women in world politics owing to false assumptions that male experiences can count for both men and women, and that women are either absent from international political activities or not relevant to global processes. It is not that women have not been present or their experiences not relevant to international relations. Rather, as Cynthia Enloe’s (1994, 2000, 2014) scholarship demonstrates, women are and have always been part of international relations – if we choose to see them there. Moreover, it is in part because

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women’s lives and experiences have not been empirically researched in the context of world politics, as Grant and Newland (1991: 5) argue, that International Relations has been largely ‘focused on conflict and anarchy and a way of practising statecraft and formulating strategy that is excessively focused on competition and fear’. Studies of the norms and ideas that make the reproduction of the state system possible and of the structural violence (poverty, environmental injustice, sociopolitical inequality, gender-based discrimination) that underpins direct state-sanctioned violence are seen as secondary to the ‘manly’ study of war and conflict in international relations owing to their association with domestic ‘soft’ (read: feminine) politics. As a result, neo-realist and neo-­ liberal International Relations scholars theorize politics and the international realm ‘in a way that guarantees that women will be absent from their inquiry, and that their research agendas remain unaltered’ (Steuernagel 1990: 79–80).

Making Women and Gender Structures Visible Empirical feminist International Relations addresses different questions and employs a variety of methodologies. For example, Boesten (2018) reflects on feminist knowledge about conflict-related sexual violence in relation to of methodological choices regarding who knows and takes seriously this violence, what are its types and subjects. Furthermore, research under the rubric of women in international development, gender and development, and, more recently, women, peace and security has documented how male bias in development and peace processes has led to poor implementation of projects and unsatisfactory policy outcomes in terms of eradicating global poverty, sustaining peace and empowering local communities (Goetz 1991; Kardam 1991; Rathergeber 1995; Davies and True 2019a). These studies make visible the central role of women as producers and providers of livelihood needs in developing and conflict-affected countries (Beneria 1982; Charlton et al. 1989; Chant 2010). They reveal that the most efficient allocation of international aid is often to provide women with appropriate resources such as agricultural technology, credit financing, education and health access. For example, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (2011) estimates that the provision of equal agricultural resources to women as compared to men would result in an increase in agricultural output in developing countries by as much as 4 per cent. Gender-sensitive researchers have found that investing in girls’ education is one of the most cost-effective international development policies, resulting in positive gains for a whole community by raising incomes and lowering population rates (see Marchand and Parpart 1995; Sen 2001). This research has since been translated into the organizational strategies of several liberal institutions engaging in development, such as the World Bank’s 2020 Learning for All Education Strategy and Gender Equality Strategy (World Bank Group 2016, 2020). Economic globalization has intensified social and economic polarization, both within and across states. Feminist International Relations scholars document how globalization processes have unevenly affected the worldwide inequality between men and women, reducing it in some contexts while increasing it in others in the context of financialization, debt and economic reforms (Afshar and Dennis 1992; Porter and Judd 2000; Elias and Roberts 2018). Early indications, for example, suggest that the worldwide pandemic as well as government restrictions and stimulus packages in response to COVID-19 are setting back achievements toward, gender equality (Azcona et  al.

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2020). Feminist research in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis exposed the critical role of a gender analysis to understanding both the cause of the crisis – the securitization of ‘households’, a feminized domain – and the failure to significantly reform financial institutions and economic systems in its wake, producing gendered consequences in employment and finance (Hozić and True 2016). As economic policy has become increasingly governed by the global imperatives of export earnings, financial markets and comparative labour costs, states have struggled to meet their commitments to full employment and citizen well-being. Empirical feminist research shows how this shift from a largely domestic state to global market provision of services has imposed a disproportionate burden on women to pick up the slack of the state (Marchand and Runyan 2000; Hoskyns and Rai 2007; Rai et al. 2014). In the global context also, an internationalized gender division of labour has been created by the disproportionate employment of migrant Third World women as a cheap and flexible source of labour for multinational corporations in free trade zones (Mitter 1986; Standing 1992; Ong 1997). Saskia Sassen’s (1991, 1998a, b) research on global cities shows how they have become the nodal points for global financial markets and economic transactions, dependent on a class of women workers. Like ‘intimate others’ of economic globalization, domestic workers, typically immigrant women of colour, service the masculinized corporate elite, be they male or female, in these urban centres (Boris and Prügl 1996; Chang and Ling 2000). Feminist research reveals an even darker ‘underside’ of globalization, however, in the phenomenal growth of sex tourism, ‘mail-order’ brides and transnational trafficking of women and girls for both labour and prostitution (Pettman 1996; Prügl and Meyer 1999; LeBaron 2015). For subordinate states in the world system, these economic activities are key sources of foreign exchange and national income (Jeffrey 2002; Hanochi 2003; Elias 2020). For example, Chin (2013) shows how the neo-liberal transformation of Kuala Lumpur into a global city has encouraged women within and beyond the region to migrate to the city to perform sex work, despite the state’s repressive policies against prostitution. Global processes of structural change do not only victimize women, however; in many cases, they are empowered by these processes. Feminist researchers explore how global trade and financial liberalization reshape women’s subjectivities and local gender relations as material conditions are transformed. These researchers highlight how new credit and employment opportunities have brought cultural changes in the lives of poor women in rural, developing areas (Gibson et  al. 2001). For example, feminist research arising in the wake of several garment factory fires in Bangladesh has shown how activists partnered with Bangladeshi labour rights circles, workers’ unions and anti-sweatshop groups to lobby major US manufacturers to improve factory safety measures and contribute to compensation funds for victims, thus empowering local workers and improving global supply chains (Ackerly 2015). Angela McCracken (2011) shows how the spread of global consumption, beauty culture and information in post-North American Free Trade Agreement Mexico has enabled different groups of Mexican women to challenge traditional gender identities and create feminist identities.

Gendering Institutional Institutions Feminist studies reveal the gendered processes and organizational culture of international institutions, which, to an even greater extent than nation-state institutions, are dominated by elite men (Rai and Waylen 2008; Caglar et al. 2012). Gender-mainstreaming initiatives have allowed

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more women to join their policymaking ranks and created the momentum for the establishment of the mega-gender equality and women’s empowerment agency, UN Women, in 2011 (True and Mintrom 2001; True and Parisi 2012). For instance, women now head many of the UN agencies and missions, including UN Women (headed by former Deputy President of South Africa Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka), the International Monetary Fund (headed by former CEO of the World Bank Group, Kristalina Georgieva), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN Environment Programme, UNESCO, UN-Habitat and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The Deputy Secretary General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights are also both women, yet there has never been a female UN Secretary General despite intense advocacy campaigns by global women’s movements. The current Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, launched a ‘gender parity’ strategy in 2018 and achieved that goal in the UN’s executive ranks for the first time in 2019. Yet, as feminist studies point out, in institutions such as the UN, women continue to be ghettoized in less powerful agencies and in administrative rather than decision-making positions (Reanda 1999). UN Women, which combines four smaller agencies previously devoted to addressing gender inequalities and the advancement of women, now has a targeted budget of US $400 million per annum. This is nonetheless a paltry sum compared with the estimated US $6.675 billion budget of the agency dedicated to children (UNICEF) in 2018, even though the plight of girl and boy children in the world is very much dependent on the relative status of their mothers. International organizations also institutionalize gender-based policies and priorities. For example, in 2019, the International Labour Organization (ILO) launched its Decent Work in the Garment Sector Supply Chains in Asia project to enhance the rights and working conditions of women garment workers and improve dialogue towards gender equality and environmental sustainability in the sector. This measure seeks to help address gendered ‘depletion’ in factory employment in global supply chains, a process by which women consistently receive inadequate replenishment for their labour efforts, which in turn devalues them to the point of disposability (Rai et al. 2014; Gunawardana 2018). Elisabeth Prügl (1999), employing a feminist constructivist approach in her study of home-workers, shows how the gendered rules and regimes of the ILO and the global solidarity networks that emerged to change them have been powerful forces in determining the plight of these mainly women workers around the world, most recently in 2019 in adopting a landmark international convention (190) concerning the elimination of violence and harassment in the world of work.

Gendering Foreign Policy and War In the realm of foreign policy, feminist analyses have revealed the dominant masculine gender of policymakers and the gendered assumption that these policymakers are strategically rational actors who make life and death decisions in the name of an abstract conception of the ‘national interest’. As Nancy McGlen and Meredith Sarkees (1993) have assessed in their study of the foreign policy and defence establishment, women are rarely ‘insiders’ of the actual institutions that make and implement foreign policy and conduct war. In 2020, the fact that sixty women hold foreign affairs portfolios and that just over 10 per cent of countries are led by women suggests that this male dominance of global diplomacy is undergoing some change (Aggestam and Towns 2019; IPU

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2020); as do the establishment of the Council of Women World Leaders (currently headed by the Prime Minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir) and the Nobel Women’s Initiative (led by women winners of the Nobel Peace Prize) that seek to leverage women leaders’ collective strengths to bring about global peace and security. However, concern remains that these sorts of strategies funnel women into gender-specific roles and thus perpetuate domestic patterns of gender inequality (Haack 2014a, b). Feminist scholars analyse the persistent ‘gender gap’ in the foreign policy beliefs of men and women foreign-policy making elites and citizens; women leaders and citizens in Western states are consistently more likely to oppose the use of force in international actions and are typically more supportive of humanitarian interventions (Rosenau and Holsti 1982; Tessler et al. 1999). People’s attitudes towards gender equality and sexual liberty also affect their attitudes towards tolerance, human rights and democracy, and are good predictors of more pacific attitudes to international conflict (Tessler and Warriner 1997). States with greater domestic gender inequality are more likely to go to war or to engage in state-sanctioned violence according to feminist International Relations scholars (Goldstein 2001). Domestic gender equality also reduces the likelihood that a state will use force first in inter-state disputes, limits the escalation of violence and decreases the severity of violence during international crises (Caprioli 2000; Caprioli and Boyer 2001). By the same token, those states that come closest to gender parity tend also to be more pacific in their relations, more generous aid donors and generally good citizens in the international realm (Regan and Paskeviciute 2003). This gender equality–peace argument and the substantial and growing evidence supporting it that has major implications for conflict prevention, however, hardly registers in the IR field compared with the much-debated democratic peace argument (discussed in Chapter 3). Frequently, our preoccupation with states can prevent us from seeing the multiple non-state actors who also play significant roles in foreign policymaking. Feminist researchers such as Enloe (1989, 2000) and Kronsell (2012) make visible the women in the military, including those who provide support services for military activities (domestic, psychological, industrial, medical and sexual). We can see militarization as a social process consisting of many gendered assignments that make possible those ultimate acts of state violence. For example, in Sex Among Allies, Katherine Moon (1997) shows how exploitative sexual alliances between Korean prostitutes (kijich’on women) and US soldiers defined and supported the similarly unequal military alliance between the United States and South Korea. Among other things, under the Nixon Doctrine, kijich’on women as personal ambassadors became the main indicator of Seoul’s willingness to accommodate US military interests (see also Zimelis 2009). Experiences of conflict are highly gendered. Empirical feminist researchers explore when and why gender-based violence is used in conflict, what makes it unique and how it affects the dynamics of conflict (Baaz and Stern 2013; Milbenge 2013; Davies and True 2015; Cohen 2016). Women and men can experience types of gender-based violence from all sides of conflicts, from all actors (men, women, soldiers, militias, civilians) and at all stages of conflict, making it a rich ground for empirical feminist research (D’Costa 2016). Likewise, in the context of migration and displacement, feminist researchers have shone a light on gender blindness and the depoliticization of women in refugee protection frameworks, despite the fact that women contribute to much of the same political organizing and activities as men and are subjected to persecution as a result of connections with male relatives and counterparts (Edwards 2010; Hall 2018).

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Introducing New Transnational Actors Women are more likely to be among the group of non-state actors in global politics. Feminist researchers highlight the activism of women, who are often marginalized, poor and vulnerable, whether in networks of sex workers, home workers, mothers or civil activists, in counter-cultural campaigns and performances. As well as highlighting local activism, however, feminist researchers have observed new forms of cross-border solidarity and identity formation. In recent years, women have played key roles in the global anti-violence movements, including as mothers protesting against their sons being conscripted in international conflicts, in the movement to ban landmines, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and protesting against sexual and gender-based violence globally (Eichler 2011; Cockburn 2012; Williams 2013; Acheson 2021). For example, since 2015, the women leading the Ni Una Menos (Not One More) movement have increased visibility of femicide and gender-based violence in Latin America and facilitated important political discussions and reforms on previously taboo topics of domestic violence, sexual assault, abortion and street harassment (Bacman 2016; De Souza 2019). Feminist researchers also investigate women’s evolving roles in terrorist organizations, including being both perpetrators of violent extremist actions as foreign fighters and female suicide bombers, and supporters of the cause in their capacity as wives, mothers and teachers (Alison 2004; Gentry and Sjoberg 2008; Loken and Zelenz 2018; Bloom and Lokmanoglu 2020). This research reveals the importance of a gender analysis to enhance understanding of the interplay between gender and terrorism; how dimensions of violent extremism affect women and men in different ways, and how their participation is influenced by gendered experiences and considerations (Phelan 2020). Noting how new female subjectivities create the momentum for new forms of collective action, feminist researchers trace the growth of transnational women’s networks, the alliances forged between women’s organizations, governments and inter-governmental actors, and the development of international legal and policy mechanisms promoting gender justice. For example, thanks to these alliances, human rights instruments and global declarations increasingly acknowledge the gender-specificity of human rights (Peters and Wolper 1995; Philapose 1996; Ackerly and Okin 1999; Ackerly 2000). In 1990, Amnesty International, the global human rights non-governmental organization, recognized women’s human rights by adding gender persecution to its list of forms of political persecution. Governments and international organizations have followed suit. For example, until the 1990s Yugoslav conflict, states and international agencies interpreted the persecution of women as a matter of personal privacy and cultural tradition (Rao 1995). However, as a result of lobbying by transnational feminist networks and the widespread media coverage of rape as a specific war strategy in the former Yugoslavia, types of sexual and gender-based violence are now prosecuted as war crimes under the Geneva Convention Against War Crimes (1949) and in the International Criminal Court (Niarchos 1995; Philapose 1996; Chappell 2008). Most recently, this statute has been used to bring the first prosecution for the crime of gender-based persecution before the International Criminal Court following an application by women’s rights organization Women in Law and Development in Africa and several other human rights groups (FIDH 2018). Bringing women’s lives and gender relations into view through empirical research has policy-­ relevant and material effects. Indeed, feminist scholars argue that only when women are recognized by states and international institutions as fundamental players in economic and political processes with relevant and distinctive perspectives to offer that can advance development, peace and sustainability will they expand the opportunities for women to participate equally with men.

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That recognition or equal participation has yet to be achieved. By redressing the empirical neglect of women and gender relations, feminist International Relations scholarship not only enhances our understanding of global politics, but also helps to put women’s voices and gender inequality on the global agenda. However, in order to make gender an important dimension of the study of international relations, it is necessary to challenge the conceptual framework that has excluded women from this study in the first place. Empirical feminism is thus complemented by analytical feminism, which reveals the theoretical exclusions of prevailing frameworks and seeks to revise our conceptual understanding of International Relations from a gender-sensitive perspective.

Analytical Feminism Analytical feminism deconstructs the theoretical framework of International Relations, revealing the gender bias that pervades key concepts and inhibits an accurate and/or comprehensive understanding of international relations. The feminist concept of ‘gender relations’ refers to the asymmetrical social constructs of masculinity and femininity as opposed to ostensibly evolutionary ‘biological’ male–female differences (although feminist post-structuralists contend that both sex and gender are socially constructed categories, see Butler 1990; Gatens 1991). Hegemonic Western masculinities are associated with autonomy, sovereignty, the capacity for reason, and objectivity and universalism, whereas the dominant notion of femininity is associated with the absence or lack of these characteristics. For example, the routine practices of militaries replicate these hegemonic gender identities by training soldiers, including female soldiers (MacBride and Wibben 2012), both to protect ‘womenchildren’ through killing and to suppress (feminine) emotions associated with bodily pain and caring (Goldstein 2001). Military training, in Barbara Roberts’ (1984: 197) words, is ‘socialization into masculinity carried to the extremes’. A common assumption is that gender identities are natural or ‘human nature’ and not subject to social constitution or human agency. When this assumption about gender is applied to social and political phenomena such as war, terrorism, financial crisis or mass sexual violence in armed conflict, however, it has political effects in terms of reproducing the status quo or existing power relations. As Joan Scott (1988: 48) has stated, ‘the binary opposition and the social process of gender relationships [have] both become part of the meaning of power itself’, and thus ‘to question or alter any aspect of [them], threatens the entire [international] system’.

Gendered Divisions of Domestic and International International Relations’ key concepts are neither natural nor gender neutral: they are derived from a social and political context where masculine hegemony has been institutionalized. Feminist scholars argue that notions of power, sovereignty, autonomy, anarchy, security and the levels of analysis typology in International Relations are inseparable from the gender division of public and private spheres institutionalized within and across states. These concepts are identified specifically with masculinity and men’s experiences and knowledge derived from an exclusive, male-dominated public sphere. Theorizing, as Devetak and True state in the introduction to this volume (Chapter 1), is the process by which we ‘engage in acts of intellectual abstraction … to search for, to test and to refine’ our analyses, in this case of International Relations. A feminist analysis reveals that the dominant International Relations conceptual framework is but one, partial, attempt to make sense of world politics.

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The discursive separation of domestic and international politics, together with the neo-realist aversion to domestic explanations for inter-state relations, obscures the prior gendered public–private division within states and masculine aversion to the latter’s association with emotion, subjectivity, reproduction, the body, femininity and women. Both explanatory and constitutive theories of world politics overlook this private sphere because it is submerged within domestic politics and state forms (Walker 1992; Sylvester 1994). The ontology of realist International Relations theory conceives the private sphere, like the international sphere, as a natural realm of disorder. The lower being, represented by women, the body and the anarchical system, must be subordinated to the higher being, represented by men, the rational mind and state authority. Jean Elshtain (1992) insists that the realist narrative of International Relations, in particular, pivots on this public–private division and its essentialist construction of femininity and masculinity as the respective cause of disorder and bringer of order. Within this order, non-hegemonic states with rigid patriarchal hierarchies that systematically repress women may also be conceived by neo-realists, neo-­liberal institutionalists and hegemonic states as part of international anarchy (and therefore justifying international war or intervention). One of the US Bush administration’s stated reasons for military intervention to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, for instance, was to protect women’s human rights; though concern for women’s rights are not at the forefront of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and current peace negotiations with the Taliban (Allen 2020). For feminist scholars, the independence of domestic politics from international politics and the separation of public from private spheres cannot be the basis for a disciplinary boundary, since anarchy outside and gender hierarchy at home may be mutually reinforcing – and indeed a key cause of war and conflict. Throughout modern history, for example, women have been told that they will receive equality with men after the war, after the revolution, when democracy has been consolidated or the national economy has been rebuilt and so on: but after all these ‘outside’ forces have been conquered and the political or post-conflict transition is over, governments and dominant groups in society call for things to go back to normal and women to their subordinate place in the family, home and private sphere. As Cynthia Enloe (2004: 215) has observed, ‘later … is a patriarchal time zone’. ‘States depend upon particular constructions of the domestic and private spheres in order to foster smooth[er] relationships at the public/international level’ (Enloe 1989: 131). But this political ordering too often results in a regression in women’s status and rights, as has been the case following the international interventions and political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa regions (Ali-Ali and Pratt 2009). Politically engaged women citizens have been subject to gender-­based ­violence, including sexual harassment, abuse, rape and murder, when seeking an equal voice in the public sphere (True 2012). At the very time when there is a crucial political opening for women’s rights advocates to influence the ‘rules of the game’, the leading institutions in the public realm and political processes, especially those relating to peace, security and political transition, have systematically marginalized them.

Feminist Revisioning of IR Levels of Analysis IR feminisms seek to theorize the relationships between gender relations, domestic and international politics despite International Relations’ conventional levels of analysis which treat the individual, the state and the international system as distinct analytic units. This theoretical schema has become ‘the most influential way of classifying explanations of war, and indeed of organising our

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understanding of inter-state relations in general’ (Walker 1987: 67). Gender analysis undermines the divisions between the individual, state and international system by showing how each level is preconditioned by an image of rational man that excludes women and femininity (Tickner 1992; Sylvester 1994). For instance, much feminist theorizing rejects neo-realist structural theory, examining how gender is constructed within states and individual behaviour that has implications for international relations. However, Laura Sjoberg (2013) asserts that the international system is itself gender-hierarchical; that assumptions about gender underlie the structure and ordering principles of the international system that affects the function of states, the distribution of capabilities among states and the political processes shaping their interaction. But because dominant discourses conceptualize international structure as gender neutral, it is difficult to see when only the ‘masculine’ (characteristics of institutions and of individual male and female actors) is present as gender is a relational factor. Sjoberg (2012: 14) argues ‘this makes the structural nature of gender hierarchy “invisible” to scholars like Waltz who are not looking for it’. This is also why the increasing presence of the ‘feminine’ in international politics (including feminine characteristics represented by some women world leaders as well as feminized issues and approaches) are perceived to unsettle international structure for better or worse, depending on the political ideology deployed (see Fukuyama 1998; Nye 2012; In the context of COVID-19 recovery, for example, women’s political leadership has led to greater gender inclusivity in responses and better public health outcomes, affirming the ongoing inclusion of women as ‘smart politics’ despite the wider remasculinization of contemporary global affairs (Davies and True 2020; Aggestam and True 2020). In International Relations theory, Kenneth Waltz (1959: 188) applies the analogy between man and the state as proof of the hostile reality that he observes in the anarchical system as a whole: ‘[a]mong men as among states there is no automatic adjustment of interests. In the absence of a supreme authority there is then the constant possibility that conflicts will be solved by force.’ Reductionist arguments explaining international conflict through conceptions of ‘evil’ human nature are frequently used in realist International Relations. Hans Morgenthau argued that the objective ‘national interest’ is rooted deeply in human nature and thus in the actions of statesmen (Tickner 1988). Even the neo-realist Waltz (1959: 238), who prefers systemic explanations, embraces Alexander Hamilton’s polemic set forth in the 1788 Federalist Papers: ‘to presume a lack of hostile motives among states is to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious’. From a feminist perspective, the implication of this man/state analogy is that rationality is equated with men’s behaviour and the state as a rational actor bears a male-masculine identity (Sylvester 1990). Most feminist theorists analyse the state as the centralized main organizer of gendered power, working in part through the construction of public–private, production–reproduction, domestic– international boundaries (Connell 1990). Feminist constructivist scholar Ann Towns (2011) reveals how the position of states today in the inter-state hierarchy is partly based on how they rank or outrank other states on the achievement of domestic gender equality in educational, political and economic outcomes. States’ reputational status in the international system is also affected by the extent to which states’ implementation of international gender norms prohibit violence against women, promote the mainstreaming of gender in public policies and establish parity quotas in legislatures and other decision-making bodies (see Krook and True 2012). Thus, state identity is not a ‘coherent identity subordinate to the gaze of a single interpretative centre’ (Ashley 1988: 230), as in neo-realist theories, but has many gendered dimensions reflecting the corporate as well as the social identity of

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the state (see Chapter 11 on constructivism). This notion reflects, rather, an idealized model of hegemonic masculinity and the patriarchal foundations of the state form. International Relations feminists argue that the state manipulates gender identities and gender equality and inequality for its own internal unity and external legitimacy. Although this is changing in some contexts, albeit not globally, men are socialized to identify with constructions of masculinity that emphasize autonomy, male superiority, fraternity, strength, public protector roles and ultimately the bearing of arms. Women, on the other hand, while traditionally taught to defer to the protection and stronger will of men, and provide the emotional, economic and social support systems for masculine war activities, are increasingly expected to contribute to the economic prosperity of a nation in the paid labour force and to promote security through official peace-building activities. Nonetheless, feminist scholars view states as deeply implicated in the production and reproduction of various forms of violence against women. For instance, many states support interpersonal gender-based and state-sanctioned violence through their stance of non-intervention in the private ‘family’ or community religious or cultural group. This also occurs when states fail the ‘due diligence’ international law standard with respect to gender discrimination in the private ‘market’ sphere, and the nature of the justice system as perpetrator  – rather than victim-oriented despite the gendered experiences of victimization (Mallicoat 2018). Both ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ states have assumed that the absence of overt coercion implies female consent despite prevailing economic, social and political gender inequalities that constrain women’s choice and exit options, let alone their opportunities for voice (Peterson 1992b: 46–47; True 2012). In conventional IR theories, the rational, self-interested actor is a metaphor for state behaviour in an anarchical international system. Abstracted from a place in time and space, from particular prejudices, interests and needs, feminist theorists claim that the model of rational man cannot be generalized: he is a masculine agent derived from a context of unequal gender relations, where women’s primary care work supports the development of autonomous selves, making cooperation for them a daily reality and relieving men and other women of these necessities. Consequently, the vast majority of people, social relationships and institutions that cannot be interpreted as coherent rational selves are thus denied agency in international politics. Feminist analysts Grant and Newland (1991: 1) argue that the study of International Relations is ‘constructed overwhelmingly by men working with mental models of human activity seen through a[n elite] male eye and apprehended through a[n elite] male sensibility’. Some feminists posit an alternative female model of agency as connected, interdependent and interrelated (Gilligan 1982; Tronto 1989). However, most feminist International Relations scholars are sceptical of positing a nurturing account of feminine nature to correct the gender bias of Waltzian man/state (cf. Elshtain 1985: 41). International Relations feminists search for richer, alternative models of agency that take account of both production and reproduction, redefine rationality to be less exclusive and instrumental, and respect human relationships (across all levels) as well as the interdependence of human beings with nature (Tickner 1991: 204–206). For example, some scholars posit a feminist ethic of care as an ontological claim about ‘the central role of care and other relational moral practices in the everyday lives of people in all settings’ rather than an epistemological stance (Robinson 2006: 225). Other feminist scholars look for emancipatory models of agency at the margins – among Third World women and human rights activists (Ackerly 2001). Feminist alternatives to IR levels of analysis reject universal abstractions. They demand

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greater historical and cultural contextualization in order to reflect more adequately the complexity and indeterminacy of human agency and social structure.

Gender Bias of IR Concepts Feminist scholars use gender analysis to uncover potential gender biases in particular IR conceptualizations of ‘power’ and ‘security’. Such bias not only limits the theoretical application of these concepts, it also has detrimental effects on the practice of international relations. Power in International Relations theory has been almost exclusively conceived of as ‘power over’: the power to force or influence someone to do something that they otherwise would not (Jaquette 1984). An individual’s or individual state’s power rests on their autonomy from the power of others. In this view, power cannot be shared nor can power be readily increased by relationships with others in the context of interdependent or common interests. The accumulation of power capabilities and resources, according to Morgenthau, is both an end and a means to security. In the context of an anarchical state system, which is interpreted as necessarily hostile and self-helping, states that act ‘rationally’ instinctively deduce their national interests as their maximization of ‘power over’ other states. The Waltzian notion of power is only mildly different. Waltz conceptualizes power as a means for the survival of a state but not as an end goal in itself, to the extent that a stable, bipolar, balance of power configuration exists between states. Consequently, in the Waltzian world view, the only power that really matters is the power capability of ‘Great Powers’, whose bipolar or multipolar arrangement brings limited order to an anarchic international realm. Tickner (1988) shows how the realist concept of power is based on masculine norms through her analysis of Hans Morgenthau’s six principles of power politics. It reflects male self-­development and objectivist ways of knowing in patriarchal societies where men’s citizenship and personal authority has traditionally relied on their head-of-household power over women’s sexuality and labour. This concept of power also rests on a particularly gender-specific notion of autonomous agency that makes human relationships and affective connections invisible. If the human world is exhaustively defined by such gendered constructions of ‘power over’, as in realist accounts, feminists ask why some leaders and regimes retreat from power non-violently, how people cooperate and mobilize in collective movements (Weldon 2006) and how post-conflict peace is sustained. Sylvester (1992: 32–38) argues that it is incoherent to posit self-help as the essential feature of world politics when many ‘relations international’ go on within households and other institutions. These relations include diplomatic negotiations, trade regimes and the socialization of future citizens, which are not based on self-help alone, but take interdependent relations between self and other as the norm. The neo-realist International Relations’ assumption that men and states are ‘like units’ presents power politics as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Power politics, however, is a gendered and therefore biased account of world politics because its conceptualization of power depends upon the particular and not the universal agency of rational man. For feminists, power is a complex phenomenon of creative social forces that shape our personal gendered identities as men, women and national citizens rather than just the deployment of brute force. As such, Enloe (1997) argues that paying attention to women can expose how much power it takes to maintain the international political system in its present form. To understand the nature of power at the international or global levels, feminists together with other critical, constructivist,

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green politics post-colonial and post-structural theorists urge that we study the domestic and transnational social relations that not only support the foreign policies of states but also constitute the state as the territorial authority with a monopoly over the use of legitimate force. Security as conventionally conceived in International Relations is also a gender-biased concept when seen from a feminist perspective. Rather than bringing security to individual women, men and children, it is equated with a situation of stability provided by militaristic states whose nuclear proliferation, ironically, is seen to prevent total war (if not the many ‘small wars’). Security is examined only in the context of the presence and absence of war, because the threat of war is considered endemic to the sovereign state system. This reactive notion of security is zero sum and by definition ‘national’. It presupposes what Peterson (1992a: 47–48) terms a ‘sovereignty contract’ established between states. According to this imaginary contract the use of military force is a necessary evil to prevent the outside – difference, irrationality, anarchy and potential conflict – from conquering the inside of homogeneous, rational and orderly states. States, in this feminist analysis, are a kind of ‘protection racket’ that by their very existence as bully ‘protectors’, create threats outside and charge for the insecurity that they bring to the ‘protected’ population ‘inside’ the state. In the name of protection, states and citizens demand the sacrifice of their members, including that of soldiers – historically men but increasingly men and women – through military conscription and that of families – historically mothers but increasingly fathers – who devote their lives to socializing these dutiful citizens for the state/nation (Elshtain 1992; Goldstein 2001). Feminists use gender analysis to critique these gendered identities and security discourses (see Shepherd 2008). Employing a feminist approach, Helen Kinsella (2005; Sjoberg 2006) explores how the ostensibly gender-neutral distinction between civilians and combatants in the laws of war is produced by gendered discourses that naturalize sex and gender difference. The categorical distinction has been deployed in gendered ways, such as, in the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s where male civilians were treated as inherently combatants and women civilians were assumed to be always victims (Kinsella 2005: 253). Kinsella argues that neither women nor men are protected by this gendered immunity principle that extends from the laws of war. Moreover, the gender stereotypes on which the just war tradition is based ‘affect the meaning of gender and the subordination of women outside wartime’, reinscribing gender hegemonies within domestic (familial) and international (civilized) orders (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 31). In the post-9/11 global ‘war on terror’, feminist scholars deconstructed American discourses of security that looked for ‘manly men’ to protect ‘us’ from ‘them’ and blamed feminism and homosexuality for weakening the resolve of the West to stamp out Islamic fundamentalism and other ‘threats’ (Bar On 2003: 456; Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Wilcox 2014; Weber 2016). Feminists also scrutinized the gendered discourses in the Islamic fundamentalist groups behind the terrorist acts of violence against the West and among the US occupation forces in Iraq (Kaufman-­ Osborn 2005). Differences in attitudes about gender and sexuality, not towards democracy or capitalism, have been the most statistically significant divide in the public opinions of Western and non-Western publics in the World Values Survey (Norris and Ingelhart 2003). These salient differences are deployed by Western and anti-Western actors to incite and to justify violence. The online activity of the 2019 Christchurch shooter in the lead-up to his violent attacks on mosques suggests that his actions were driven not only by white nationalism, but by a broader ideology of group subjugation in the form of misogyny, racism, homophobia and bigotry (True et al. 2019; Hoffman et  al. 2020). Likewise, when Islamic fundamentalists deride the depraved morals of the West,

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referring to sexual equality and women’s rights norms, they heighten the potential for conflict between non-Western and Western states, although international alliances are still possible, as in the multiple state interventions against Islamic State (Parashar et al. 2018). Gendered analysis reveals masculine identities and states, domestic and international violence, to be inextricably related. The limited security they provide allows them to consolidate their authority over other men and states, but importantly also over women and territory, on which they depend for a source of exploitable resources, and for the socio-cultural and biological reproduction of power relations. Paying attention to women’s as well as men’s experiences in peace and war, feminist analysts urge that security must be redefined. In particular, what is called ‘national security’ endangers human survival and sustainable environments (see Chapter 12). State military apparatuses create their own security dilemmas by claiming control and power over in the form of offensive weaponry as an effective way to deter threats, which may generate further threats as a result. Concepts such as ‘rationality’, ‘security’ and ‘power’ are not inherently gender-biased and could be building blocks for a feminist theory and practice of international politics (Tickner 1991). It is their narrow, gendered meanings in conventional IR theory and practice that are most problematic for feminist analysts. Runyan and Peterson (1991: 70) claim that dichotomous thinking – inside–outside, sovereignty–anarchy, domestic–international  – prevents International Relations theory from being able to ‘conceptualise, explain, or deliver the very things it says it is all about – security, power and sovereignty’. For International Relations feminists, these conceptual opposites reproduce a self-fulfilling security dilemma and reinforce masculine power politics, thus limiting the chance for creating a more just and equal world order. Mapping changes in norms and practices to assess whether the gendered assumptions inhibiting the dominant IR conceptual framework have shifted across time and space could further feminisms’ analytical contribution to the discipline (see Wiener 2018; True and Wiener 2019; Chapter 10).

Normative Feminism Normative feminism is the aspect of feminisms that reflects on the process of theorizing gender and international relations as part of a normative agenda for global change. ‘All forms of feminist theorising are normative, in the sense that they help us to question certain meanings and interpretations in IR theory’ (Sylvester 2002: 248). Feminists are self-consciously explicit about the position from which they are theorizing, how they enter the IR field and go about their research (Ackerly and True 2008b). They view their social and political context and subjectivity as part of a theoretical explanation. Gender is a transformative category from a normative perspective not because we can deconstruct or do away with it, but because once we understand it as a social construction we can transform how it works at all levels of social and political life, including global politics. Empirical and theoretical aspects of feminist scholarship through research and gender analysis are important contributions, but they are only starting points for feminist goals of transforming global social hierarchies (Robinson 2006, 2011; Hutchings 2013). Feminist scholarship also brings women’s experiences and activism to bear on normative debates in International Relations (Cochran 1999; Robinson 1999; Ackerly 2000; Hutchings 2004). Within feminist practices there are resources for developing normative guidelines about peace and democratization processes,

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security operations, the meaning and implementation of universal human rights, and global economic policies as well as global dialogues across ethnic, cultural, national, racial, sexual and gender differences. Care ethics is one example of how feminist theory can inform ethical guidelines for humanitarian intervention, UN peacekeeping, development aid and human rights protection (see Hutchings 2000; Robinson 2019). Joan Tronto (2006), for example, assesses the normative framework supporting multilateral peacekeeping from a feminist perspective, arguing that the shift from the right to intervene in a sovereign state to a responsibility to protect citizens not protected by their own state is a shift from liberal to care ethics, from the masculine assumption of an autonomous self to the assumption of a relational self with responsibilities to others. The emergent ‘1325: Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) norm and subsequent United Nations Security Council Resolutions since 2000 can be seen in some regard to operationalize this feminist normative perspective in that they embrace state responsibilities to protect against and prevent armed conflict, including sexual and gender-based violence, and the distinctive impacts of war on women and girls (see Davies and True 2019). The debate over feminist International Relations ‘ethical principles’ and whether they apply to the global practices of diplomats, militaries, policymakers and advocates has most recently emerged in the context of ‘feminist’ foreign policy and ‘feminist peace’ (see Aggestam and Bergman-­ Rosamond 2016; Wibben et al. 2019; Aggestam and True 2020) (Box 8.1). Practices of gender mainstreaming, gender-sensitive aid provision and the creation of specific leadership roles and portfolios to uphold women’s security and human rights agendas are now largely embedded in foreign policy domains, albeit with ongoing resistance from some state and non-state actors (Aggestam and True 2020). Normative feminist analysis of the limits and failures of international peace and security influenced the WPS agenda established in 2000 with UN Security Council Resolution 1325. This has produced a significant international normative and policy framework seeking to address the gendered impacts of conflict on women and girls, and the prevention of conflict through more inclusive and gender-equal political participation (Davies and True 2019).

Diverse Feminist Epistemologies Feminist epistemologies and epistemological debate about ‘how we know’ reflect the normative aspect of feminist scholarship. They challenge the masculine authority and universalism of science (McClure 1992: 359), suggesting alternative, feminist approaches to knowledge generation, such as those found in dialogue with indigenous knowledges (Smith 2014; Tickner 2015). Feminist perspectives share a normative struggle to produce knowledge that is accountable to diverse women’s movements and sustains connections to practical feminist politics and the concrete workings of gendered power. All feminist scholars problematize the defining dichotomies of the International Relations field that are reinforced through their association with the masculine–feminine gender dichotomy: for example, the association of women and femininity with peace, cooperation, subjectivism and ‘soft’ domestic politics, and men and masculinity with war, competition, objectivity and ‘hard’ international politics (Elshtain 1987; Sylvester 1987, 1994, 2002). They question how these gender hierarchies are reproduced in International Relations theories and how they serve to naturalize other forms of power and domination in world politics. From a normative feminist perspective attentive to the politics of knowledge, gender difference is not merely about the relations between masculine and feminine identities, it is about how and from what position in the hierarchy we can know.

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Box 8.1  Feminist Foreign Policy A growing number of states and political leaders promote gender equality as part of their foreign policies. Sweden, Canada, Mexico, France and Luxembourg have explicitly ‘feminist’ foreign policies. It would have been hard to imagine this development twenty-five years ago when the first edition of Theories of International Relations was published, let alone before. With the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) in 2000, women’s security is increasingly linked to national and international security. The promotion of women’s representation, equality and empowerment in foreign policy is framed as ‘smart diplomacy and economics’ by the United States and other governments and international organizations such as the World Bank. Over eighty states and several major powers have now incorporated the WPS agenda into their foreign policy pillars, and women’s high-level participation in peace processes, politics and civil movements has resulted in more sustainable peace and more gender-equal societies. Is the emergence of pro-gender equality and feminist foreign policies evidence of the impact of feminist theories of International Relations or of their co-optation? Feminism as an IR theory has had and continues to play a large role in the rise of a pro-gender, feminist-informed foreign policy. Far from ‘adding women and stirring’ (Peterson 1992), feminist scholars have emphasized major ideational and structural factors that are driving the transformation of states and societies, including the spread of international norms promoting gender equality and women’s rights, the transnational feminist networks actively promoting policy and political change, and the limitations of patriarchal frameworks of power and political leadership the world over. Feminist theory emphasizes the state as a multifaceted organ of agencies and actors that generates gaps and opportunities for feminist intervention. The rise of Eisenstein’s (1996) ‘femocrats’ and the influence of women’s transnational

civil society movements on gender-specific policy outcomes (True and Mintrom 2001) attest to the gradual development of a feminist voice in policymaking (Htun and Weldon 2012). Just as comparative feminist studies assess how gender norms arise and spread within and across states, feminist IR theorizes change and continuity in foreign policy and assesses the limitations of and the potential for transformative foreign policy measured against feminist normative goals (McBride Stetson and Mazur 1995; Aggestam et al. 2019; Aggestam and True 2020). The adoption of pro-gender equality norms within foreign policies depends greatly on the political leadership of individual feminist figures and norm entrepreneurs (Bashevkin 2014; Davies and True 2017) as well as on the orientation of the state and its domestic identity and interests. States such as Sweden and Canada that advance these norms in their foreign policy have largely institutionalized gender equality domestically (Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond 2016). Less powerful states are swayed by the global diffusion of pro-gender norms, notably via the WPS agenda, as a means to greater international recognition (Haastrup 2020). While there is significant progress in a number of countries towards a feminist foreign policy, the resilience of this trend remains to be seen. The rise of illiberalism, authoritarianism and right-wing populism has re-­masculinized the international political arena, with attacks on women’s rights and autonomy suggestive of a regression in feminist foreign policy practice (Aggestam and True 2021). Feminist scholars do not expect a linear trajectory in international relations, but question to what extent erosion of the present liberal international order will undermine gender equality and women’s rights. IR feminists ask whether the labelling of foreign policies as ‘feminist’ represents genuine progress for all women; and to what extent the feminist foreign policy movement is reimagining diplomacy and security by taking seriously women’s diverse lives and participation.

Cynthia Enloe’s (2004, 2014) research radically subverts conventional ways of knowing and doing International Relations. To make sense of international politics, she analyses the (extra)ordinary lives of women from below – which the history of the discipline would tell us is the least likely place for ‘high politics’. Enloe reveals constructions of masculinity and femininity at the heart of international processes. Her standpoint epistemology encourages us to broaden our ways of knowing ‘the

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truth’ of international politics, and to consider from whose perspective state ‘legitimate’ force is the most significant expression of violence and potent explanation for war. If asking questions about women’s location in world politics, addressed by empirical feminist International Relations, is dependent upon bringing gender in as an analytical construct to explain the patterns of women’s marginalization at every level of state and global politics, then normative feminist theoretical debates consider how gender identity should be defined, interrogating the binary concept of gender itself. The mutually exclusive opposition of masculinity and femininity is not ‘the essence from which social organization can be explained’, as in evolutionary socio-biology or psychology accounts (Scott 1988: 2); rather, it is a social construction that must itself be explained before it can be transformed. While analytical feminist theories created the category of gender to reveal the social construction of women’s oppression, normative feminist theories contextualize gender as an analytical device that harbours its own exclusions and must be critically interrogated in theorizing International Relations (Sylvester 2002). ‘Queer IR’ is such a normative feminist theory that challenges the mutual exclusivity of binary gender. Queer feminist scholars argue that masculinity and femininity are not absolute categories in International Relations, but rather that the defiance of gender binaries and embrace of paradoxes in relation to gender and sexuality suggests that International Relations actors can be seen as queer (Wilcox 2014). Addressing the queer logic of global politics, Cynthia Weber (2016) discusses the (un)conventional figuration of the ‘homosexual’ as a sexualized subjectivity that is intimately intertwined with sovereign statecraft. Wilcox (2015) illustrates queer logic in the context of drone warfare as part of a wider understanding of bodies and violence in International Relations. A drone’s provision of surveillance and protection to ground soldiers both masculinizes drones as post-human, post-sex military technology and feminizes soldiers by shifting their embodiment from one of masculine bravery in combat to a site in need of protection (Wilcox 2015; Clark 2018).

Deconstructing Gender Since the 1990s, there has been some controversy over the application of gender in International Relations and across feminist studies. In International Relations, two main criticisms of gender as a concept have arisen. The first criticism is that the analytic use of gender masks other forms of oppression prevalent in global politics. Speaking to a Western women’s studies audience in the 1980s from a Third World feminist standpoint, Chandra Mohanty (1991) criticized Western feminism for constructing the victimized ‘Third World woman’ based on universal, Western assumptions of gender, emptied of all historical, cultural and geographical specificity, including realities of race and class oppression. As in the adage ‘the master’s tools won’t bring down the master’s house’, Mohanty made the point that Western categories cannot be used to challenge the imposition of Western categories and imperialist structures in non-Western societies. Post-colonial feminists in International Relations employ this analysis to scrutinize how women have been instrumentalized for social reproduction and state-building in post-conflict zones and the gendered depletion that results from this role (Chilmeran and Pratt 2019). The implication of the postcolonial feminist challenges for International Relations is that a universal concept of gender cannot be applied globally (see Chapter 5). Gender relations are

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socially, culturally and historically constructed; thus, it follows that they cannot be the same everywhere. The concept of intersectionality has called attention to the fact that any International Relations event, process or actor needs to be understood in terms of the overlapping contexts and social forces such as race, ethnicity, indigeneity, age, gender, sexuality, nationality and socio-­ economic class, among many others (see Crenshaw 1989; Ackerly and True 2020). The complexity of an issue may hide its gender dimension, even though it may be crucial to identifying its causes and solutions. International Relations feminists thus seek to understand how gender constructions at the global level are shaped and reshaped by myriad other social forces, including localized gender discourses and norms that have impacts on women’s and men’s lives depending on their race, nationality, class and so on (Cloward 2016; de Jong 2017). Recognizing the potential for Western imperialism when universal categories of ‘woman’ or ‘man’ are deployed, feminist scholarship explores the dynamic intersectional relationship between the global political economy, the state and culturally and geographically race- and class-specific gender relations (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Parashar et al. 2018). Normative feminism recognizes that there is no feminist ‘high ground’ from which to theorize about international relations. Sylvester (1994: 12) argues that ‘all places to speak and act as women are problematic’, because they are socially and historically constructed and exclude other identities. She destabilizes the feminist position that women’s experience can constitute the ground(s) for a more critical and universal theory of international relations, in favour of multiple feminist standpoints that question the discipline’s hegemonic knowledge. Feminism ‘is the research posture of standing in many locations, illuminating important relations and practices darkened by the long shadows of official IR … Feminism has many types and shifting forms. It is non-uniform and non-­ consensual; it is a complex matter with many internal debates’ (Sylvester 2002: 269). International Relations feminism demonstrates that it is possible to do research and make normative claims, despite there being no uncontested and many different ontological starting points for theories of international relations. Feminism’s normative goal of un-gendering social and political relations depends on politically organizing on the basis of gender ‘as women’. Contrary to the tenets of 1970s radical feminism, however, there is no easily realized, readily mobilized, global sisterhood. Rather, feminist cooperation, as Htun and Weldon (2012) reveal in their analysis of the global movement to eradicate violence against women, must be created by acknowledging and confronting, not ignoring, the differences among women. In the context of climate change policy, this confrontation involves subverting the gendered stereotyping of women as passive, vulnerable subjects of climate change and instead incorporating women into multi-level policymaking forums, where they can offer unique localized insights into the consequences of climate change and provide gender-responsive solutions (Tanyag and True 2019). The very tension between positivist and post-positivist epistemologies that has often divided contemporary International Relations theorists, has often been the source of feminisms’ theoretical dynamism and political relevancy. International Relations feminism acknowledges the lack of a foundational collective subject ‘woman’, and a relatively bounded realm of the international or the political. Feminist perspectives nonetheless seek to make a difference to women and men’s daily lives, with the realization that gendered categories, including some feminist categories, have historically served to marginalize many people, silencing their experiences of violence and agency.

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Empirical and analytical feminisms challenge given ways of thinking about and doing International Relations. But feminisms do more than this. Feminist questions about why the agents – statesmen and soldiers – typically examined in International Relations theories tend to be men leads us to consider the normative status of International Relations itself, including the gendered identity of scholars and the intersection of these identities with rationalist theories and positivist epistemologies in the International Relations field (see Ackerly and True 2008a). Introducing the world views of women as well as others who are differently and often marginally situated in the present world order exemplifies the normative feminist perspective that there are multiple standpoints from which to view global politics, and that each may reveal distinct realities and relationships.

Conclusion This chapter began by asking how feminist perspectives help us understand and improve international relations. Addressing that question, it explored the empirical, analytical and normative contributions of feminisms, which have both challenged and enrichened International Relations theory. Feminists in and outside the field of International Relations are continually adding to our analytical concepts, and our empirical and normative knowledge; for instance, to take account of the political activities and activism of women whether they are mobilizing for war, terrorism and its prevention or protesting against state stockpiles of nuclear weapons and organizing for the international recognition of women’s human rights. Feminism also encourages International Relations theories to be more reflexive about the power of epistemology, of boundaries and relationships, and how they shape our knowledge and practice in world politics. Feminists have argued that conventional International Relations theories distort our knowledge of both ‘relations’ and the ongoing transformations of the ‘international’. As such, the tools of gender analysis have reconceptualized understandings of state behaviour, international norms and law and global civil society, and therein expanded and strengthened liberal, critical theory, post-modern, post-colonial, constructivist and green theories of international relations. Feminist International Relations theories have revealed the political significance of gendered norms, identities and structures institutionalized within states, and by extension the state system. Realist and liberal theories, by contrast, tend to reproduce the gendered dichotomies that have come to demarcate the field: they define power as power over ‘others’, autonomy as separation rather than relationality, international politics as the negation of domestic, ‘soft’, ‘low’ politics, and the absence of women and objectivity as the lack of (feminine or feminized) subjectivity. International Relations theories have been shown to have major blind spots with respect to global social and political change. This conceptual blindness frequently leads to empirical blindness. It is not surprising then that International Relations analysts are often caught off-guard by events in world politics, for example when a health pandemic constitutes a major threat to global stability. This chapter has argued not that feminisms can predict or explain such change more accurately, but that International Relations theories that fail to take gender – and indeed diverse women’s voices – seriously overlook critical global dynamics and abandon a crucial opening for effecting greater peace and stability. Feminist International Relations scholarship offers fresh insights into

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sites of global power and transformation that are not just the domain of political and economic elites. Traditional expectations about the nature of states and international relations are disrupted when a gendered perspective is brought to bear. Feminisms help us to recognize power shifts within nation-states and internationally, not least of women’s rising political leadership and leadership of social movements for equality, peace and justice, and the impact of changing gender balances in decision-making that have ramifications for world order. Observing and interpreting such power shifts as they arise in a variety of global and local venues constitute core functions of contemporary and future-oriented International Relations scholarship.

Glossary Terms Gender equality: The process of advancing the equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities of women and men and girls and boys, and sexual and gender minorities. Equality between women and men is seen as a human rights issue, as a precondition for, and indicator of, sustainable peoplecentred development and as a foundation of stability and peace. Gender equality is not a women’s issue, it is a societal and global issue.

Gender mainstreaming: A globally accepted strategy for promoting gender equality. Mainstreaming is not an end in itself, but rather a strategy, an approach and a means to advance the goal of gender equality. Mainstreaming involves ensuring that gender perspectives – both recognition of gender differences and attention to the goal of gender equality – are central to all activities.

Gender-sensitive conflict analysis: The systematic study of gender power relations, including systems, structures and institutions, and cultural, political, social, economic and security dynamics that contribute to violence and instability, and perpetuate gender inequalities within and across groups.

Gendered states: The state is gendered in its constitution and practices that have throughout history structurally privileged men and hegemonic masculinity while subordinating women in myriad ways. Different types of states are gendered with regard to their identities, symbolism, institutions and structures in specific and nuanced ways, examples being the security state, peacekeeping state, postcolonial state and feminist state.

Intersectionality: The condition under which that any event, actor or process in international relations can only be understood in terms of intersecting and overlapping contexts and social forces such as race, age, gender, sexuality, nationality, socio-economic class, historical moment and so on. Feminist analysis aims to address the complexity of international relations and to make visible hidden ‘intersectional’ dimensions.

Queer theory: A theory that interrogates and disrupts binary gender dichotomies, male/female, masculine/feminine. Contemporary international relations demonstrate queer logics where gender hierarchies are both being destabilized and reinscribed.

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Further Reading Aggestam, K. and Towns, A. (eds.) (2018) Gendering Diplomacy and International Negotiation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Davies, S.E. and True, J. (eds.) (2019) The Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace and Security (New York: Oxford University Press). Elias, J. and Roberts, A. (eds.) (2018) Handbook on Gender and International Political Economy (London: Edward Elgar). Parashar, S.J., Tickner, A. and True, J. (eds.) (2018) Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations (Gender in International Relations Series. New York: Oxford University Press). Tickner, J.A. and True, J. (2018) ‘A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War One Women’s Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda’, International Studies Quarterly 62(2): 221–233.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM RICHARD DEVETAK

9

Understanding the relationship between the structures of continuity and the forces of change has been a key feature of international relations theory for several decades (Ruggie 1983). Realists tend to emphasize continuity caused by the structure of anarchy, while liberals see interaction processes and evolving state behaviours as forces of international change. While there are major differences between Marxists, constructivists, feminists, post-structuralists, postcolonial and critical theorists, they share a view of the potential for change that arises out of the contingent historical practices of states and other actors. The sources, nature and profundity of the change, however, vary greatly among the rival theories. One of the distinctive aspects of post-structuralism is the figure of the ‘event’ (Lundborg 2012) as an eruptive moment that breaks through structures of continuity and sameness, opening up possibilities of transformative change (Hunter 2009). According to Tom Lundborg (2016: 114), post-structuralism offers an ‘alternative form of critique’ that is concerned ‘to disrupt the “modern” political present’. It not only examines continuity in modernity, but interrogates ‘political moments of rupture’ that elude the comprehension of rival theories (Lundborg 2016: 115). Before elaborating how the figure of the event features in post-structuralist theories of international relations, it is important to outline its approach to knowledge formation. The chapter first deals with the relationship between power and knowledge in the study of international relations. The second section outlines the textual strategies employed by post-structuralist approaches. The chapter then shifts focus to the substantive problems of politics in a world of states in which the figure of the event remains irrepressible, even though it is obscured by traditional theories. The third section is thus concerned with how post-structuralism deals with the state. The final section of the chapter outlines post-structuralism’s attempt to rethink the concept of the political.

Power and Knowledge in International Relations Within orthodox social scientific accounts, knowledge ought to be immune from the influence of power. The study of international relations, or any scholarly study for that matter, is thought to require the suspension of values, interests and power relations in the pursuit of objective knowledge – knowledge uncontaminated by external influences and based on pure reason. Kant’s (1970: 115) caution that ‘the possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgement of reason’ stands as a classic example of this view. It is this view that post-structuralism problematizes by drawing upon the writings of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault.

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Rather than treat the production of knowledge as simply a cognitive matter, post-structuralism treats it as an aesthetic, normative and political matter (Shapiro 1999: 1). Nietzsche, for example, argued that ‘when we say something about the world we also inevitably say something about our conception of the world – something that is linked not to the facts and phenomena we try to comprehend but to the assumptions and conventions of knowing that we have acquired over time and that have become codified in language’ (Bleiker and Chou 2010: 9). For this reason, as Roland Bleiker and Mark Chou (2010) show admirably, Nietzsche places great emphasis on language, and particularly style and metaphor, in the production of knowledge. On this understanding, language is less a neutral, pure medium of communication than a mediating set of habits, conventions, values and prejudices enabling us to make sense of the world. Though less concerned with the question of style than Nietzsche, Foucault was no less concerned to debunk the idea that knowledge was neutral. In particular, he wanted to see if there was a common matrix that tied together the fields of knowledge and power. According to Foucault, there is a general consistency, which cannot be reduced to an identity, between modes of interpretation and operations of power. Power and knowledge are mutually supportive; they directly imply one another (Foucault 1977: 27). The task therefore is to see how operations of power fit with the wider social and political matrices of the modern world. For example, in Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault investigates the possibility that the evolution of the penal system is intimately connected to the human sciences. His argument is that a ‘single process of “epistemologico-­ juridical” formation’ underlies the history of the prison on the one hand, and the human sciences on the other (1977: 23). In other words, the prison is consistent with modern society and modern modes of apprehending ‘man’s’ world. This type of analysis has been attempted in international relations by various thinkers. Richard Ashley has exposed one dimension of the power–knowledge nexus by highlighting what Foucault calls the ‘rule of immanence’ between knowledge of the state and knowledge of ‘man’. Ashley’s (1989a) argument, stated simply, is that, ‘[m]odern statecraft is modern mancraft’. He seeks to demonstrate how the ‘paradigm of sovereignty’ simultaneously gives rise to a certain epistemological disposition and account of modern political life. On the one hand, knowledge is thought to depend on the sovereignty of ‘the heroic figure of reasoning man who knows that the order of the world is not God-given, that man is the origin of all knowledge, that responsibility for supplying meaning to history resides with man himself, and that, through reason, man may achieve total knowledge, total autonomy, and total power’ (1989a: 264–265). On the other hand, modern political life finds in sovereignty its constitutive principle. The state is conceived by analogy with sovereign man as a pre-given, bounded entity that enters into relations with other sovereign presences. Sovereignty acts as the ‘master signifier’, as Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat (1999: 6) put it. Both ‘man’ and the state are marked by the presence of sovereignty, which contrasts with international relations that is marked, and violently so, by the absence of sovereignty (or alternatively stated, the presence of multiple sovereignties). In short, the theory and practice of international relations are conditioned by the constitutive principle of sovereignty.

Genealogy It is important to grasp the notion of genealogy, as it has become crucial to many post-structuralist perspectives in international relations. Genealogy is a style of historical thought that exposes and registers the significance of power–knowledge relations. It is perhaps best known through

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Nietzsche’s radical assault on the concept of origins. As Roland Bleiker (2000: 25) explains, genealogies ‘focus on the process by which we have constructed origins and given meaning to particular representations of the past, representations that continuously guide our daily lives and set clear limits to political and social options’. It is a form of history that historicizes those things that are thought to be beyond history, including those things or thoughts that have been buried, covered or excluded from view in the writing and making of history. Key Concept: Genealogy Genealogy is a mode of writing history, first developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and more recently by Michel Foucault, that exposes the relations between power and knowledge and questions dominant historical notions of origins and progress. History, when understood from a genealogi-

cal perspective, does not evince a neat linear unfolding of freedom, progress, meaning, reason or truth. Rather, it is a struggle over these things, ‘the endlessly repeated play of dominations’, as Foucault (1987: 228) put it, to impose regimes of power and knowledge.

In a sense, genealogy is concerned with writing counter-histories that expose the processes of exclusion and covering-over that make possible the teleological idea of history as a unified story unfolding with a clear beginning, middle and end. History, from a genealogical perspective, does not evidence a gradual disclosure of truth and meaning. Rather, it stages ‘the endlessly repeated play of dominations’ (Foucault 1987: 228), or at least ‘the diversity and specificity of battles’ between rival interpretations (Vucetic 2011: 1300). History proceeds as a series of dominations and impositions in knowledge and power, and the task of the genealogist is to unravel history to reveal the multifarious trajectories that have been fostered or closed off in the constitution of subjects, objects, fields of action and domains of knowledge. Moreover, from a genealogical perspective, there is not one single, grand history, but many interwoven histories varied in their rhythm, tempo and power–knowledge effects. Genealogy affirms a perspectivism that denies the capacity to identify origins and meanings in history objectively. A genealogical approach is anti-essentialist in orientation, affirming the idea that all knowledge is situated in a particular time and place and issues from a particular perspective. The subject of knowledge is situated in, and conditioned by, a political and historical context, and constrained to function with particular concepts and categories of knowledge. Knowledge is never unconditioned. As a consequence of the heterogeneity of possible contexts and positions, there can be no single Archimedean perspective that trumps all others. There is no ‘truth’, only competing perspectives. David Campbell’s analysis of the Bosnian war in National Deconstruction (1998a) affirms this perspectivism. As he rightly reminds us, ‘the same events can be represented in markedly different ways with significantly different effects’ (1998a: 33). Indeed, the upshot of his analysis is that the Bosnian war can be known only through perspective. In the absence of a universal frame of reference or overarching perspective, we are left with a plurality of perspectives. As Nietzsche (1969: III, 12) put it, ‘There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”.’ The modern idea, or ideal, of an objective or all-encompassing perspective is displaced in post-structuralism by the Nietzschean recognition that there is always more than one perspective and that each perspective embodies a particular set of values. Moreover, these perspectives do not simply offer different views of the same ‘real world’. The very idea of the

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‘real world’ has been ‘abolished’ in Nietzsche’s thought (1990: 50–51), leaving only perspectives, only interpretations of facts and interpretations, or, in Derrida’s (1974: 158) terms, only ‘textuality’. Perspectives are thus not to be thought of as simply optical devices for apprehending the ‘real world’, like a telescope or microscope, but also as the very fabric of that ‘real world’. For post-­ structuralism, following Nietzsche, perspectives are integral to the constitution of the ‘real world’, not just because they are our only access to it, but because they are basic and essential elements of it. The warp and weft of the ‘real world’ is woven out of perspectives and interpretations, none of which can claim to correspond to reality-in-itself, to be a ‘view from nowhere’ or to be exhaustive. Perspectives are thus component objects that go towards making up the ‘real world’ at the same time as they give humans access to it. In fact, we should say that there is no object or event outside or prior to perspective or narrative. As Campbell explains, after Hayden White, narrative is central, not just to understanding an event, but to constituting that event. This is what Campbell (1998a: 34) means by the ‘narrativizing of reality’. According to such a conception, events acquire the status of ‘real’ not because they occurred but because they are remembered and because they assume a place in a narrative (1998a: 36). Narrative is thus not simply a re-presentation of some prior event, it is the means by which the status of reality is conferred on events. But historical narratives also perform vital political functions in the present; they can be used as resources in contemporary political struggles (1998a: 84; 1999: 31). The event designated by the name ‘September 11’ (or 9/11) is a case in point. Is it best conceived as an act of terrorism, a criminal act, an act of evil, an act of war or an act of revenge? (Devetak 2009). Perhaps it is best thought of as an instance of ‘Islamo-fascism’ or the clash of civilizations? Or perhaps as ‘blowback’? Furthermore, which specific acts of commission and omission constitute this event? Did 9/11 begin at 8.45 a.m. when American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, or at 7.59 a.m. when the plane departed from Boston? Did it commence when the perpetrators began planning and training for the attack? Or did it begin even earlier, as a reaction (however unjustified) to US Middle East policy? These questions show that the event of 9/11 is only constituted in a narrative that is integrated into a sequence of other events and thereby confers significance upon it. Genealogy is a reminder of the essential agonism in the historical constitution of identities, unities, disciplines, subjects and objects that make up narratives of reality. From this perspective, ‘all history, including the production of order, [is comprehended] in terms of the endless power-­ political clash of multiple wills’ (Ashley 1987: 409). Metaphors of war and battle are central to genealogy. In a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in 1975 and 1976 under the title ‘Society Must be Defended’, Foucault employed genealogy to analyse power relations in the state. He explored a historico-political discourse dating from the end of the civil and religious wars of the 16th century that understood war to be ‘a permanent social relationship, the ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power’ (Foucault 2003: 49). This discourse, found in early modern European law, challenged the prevailing assumption of the day that society is at peace. Instead, beneath the calm, peaceful order of law-governed society posited by philosophico-juridical discourses, this discourse perceived ‘a sort of primitive and permanent war’, according to Foucault (2003: 47). Inverting Clausewitz’s famous proposition, Foucault (2003: 15) characterized politics as ‘the continuation of war by other means’. Foucault’s intention was to analyse how war became viewed

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as an apt way of describing politics. He wanted to know when political thought began to imagine, perhaps counter-intuitively, that war serves as a principle for the analysis of power relations within political order. This conflictual understanding of society is equally at odds with Kantian liberalism and Hobbesian realism. If anything, it seems to pre-empt Nietzsche’s emphasis on struggle. Political power, instituted and legitimized in the sovereign state, does not bring war to an end; rather, ‘In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war’ (2003: 50). This ‘war discourse’ posits a binary structure that pervades civil society, wherein one group is pitted against another in continuing struggle. Foucault (1987: 236) claims as one of genealogy’s express purposes the ‘systematic dissociation of identity’, challenging the givenness of individual or group identity. There are two dimensions to this purpose. First, it has a purpose at the ontological level: to avoid substituting causes for effects (metalepsis). It does not take identity or agency as given but seeks to account for the forces that underwrite this apparent agency. Identity or agency is an effect to be explained, not assumed. This means resisting the temptation to attribute essences to agents, things or events in history, and requires a transformation of the question ‘what is?’ into ‘how is?’. For Nietzsche, Foucault and thus post-structuralism, it is more important to determine the forces that give shape to an event or a thing than to attempt to identify its hidden, fixed essence. Second, it has an ethico-political purpose in problematizing prevailing identity formations that appear normal or natural. It refuses to use history for the purpose of affirming present identities, preferring to use it instead to disturb identities that have become dogmatized, conventionalized or normalized. A more general purpose of genealogy may also be discerned; Foucault’s (1977: 31) interest in ‘writing the history of the present’. A history of the present asks: How have we made the present seem like a normal or natural condition? What has been forgotten and what has been remembered in history in order to legitimize the present and present courses of action? (Box 9.1). Box 9.1 9/11 and the War on Terror: The Politics of the Event The study of international relations often hails the significance of events, especially those that initiate war. From the defenestration of Prague at the beginning of the Thirty Years War (1648) to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that sparked the First World War (1914), such events are thought to have changed the course of history. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were viewed by many political commentators, IR theorists and members of the public as another such event. But what exactly is an event in the world of politics? Post-structuralist IR theorist Jenny Edkins (2002: 245–246) has argued that events such as 9/11 cannot be experienced in any normal sense. Rather, they exceed experience and our normal social and linguistic frameworks. Our extant theories and concepts are incapable of comprehending such an event because they were designed to comprehend ‘normal’ politics. Here Edkins draws upon a concept that post-structuralist theorists such as

Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Jean-­ François Lyotard have elaborated. For these theorists, the event truly worthy of the name disrupts or even destroys pre-existing modes of knowledge, unsettling traditional conceptual and theoretical frameworks. By denoting a rupture, the event thus bears both historical and philosophical significance. More radically, the event ‘changes how the everyday world is experienced, modifying our relations to ourselves, to others, to things and to other events’ (Devetak 2009: 796). There is no guarantee, however, that the radical nature of the event will be properly recognized. Indeed, as Campbell and Edkins lamented, there was a rush to make the event of 9/11 intelligible within the intellectual frames of extant theories. Despite the White House asserting the unprecedented nature of the 9/11 attacks, Campbell (2002a) observed, the response, known as the ‘war on terror’, marked a reversion to past foreign policy practices, morphing into a Cold War mentality

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in the way it represented the danger (Campbell 1999: 17; see also Walker 2009; Hansen 2017). ‘This return of the past means that we have different objects of enmity, different allies, but the same structure for relating to the world through foreign policy’ (Campbell 2002a: 18). Cynthia Weber (2002) made a similar argument, suggesting that the Pearl Harbor attacks of 7 December 1941 provided an interpretive framework for the US military response. 9/11 was thus interpreted as an event with the same meaning. So, despite the common perception of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an unprecedented event, there was a sense in which it induced a return to old ways of thinking, failing to grasp the event’s singularity or uniqueness. For post-structuralism, the representation of any political event will always be susceptible to competing interpretations. Indeed, the event only acquires meaning, its ‘eventness’ only takes shape, in and through narrative (Devetak 2009: 797). One of the foremost post-structuralist means of narrating an event is through genealogy. A good example of this genealogical method is to be found in Maja Zehfuss’s (2003) analysis of 9/11 and the war on terrorism. She challenged assumptions about unified agency and about the relationship between causes and effects. As she pointed out, to imply that the event of 9/11 was an attack on ‘the West’, as the US and UK governments did, was to ignore the ambiguous character of Western identity. At a minimum, it ignored the fact that Western nations are complicit with the technologies and perpetrators, but it also ignored political dissent from those who do not wish the memory of the dead to be used to perpetuate further violence

(Zehfuss 2003: 524–525). Following Nietzsche, Zehfuss (2003: 522) also questioned cause-andeffect thinking: ‘cause and effect are … never as easily separated’ as they appear to be. For example, governments leading the so-called war on terror implied that 9/11 caused the war on terror. It is as if 9/11 were ‘an “uncaused” cause’ (Zehfuss 2003: 521), or as if, in Judith Butler’s (2004: 6) words, ‘There is no relevant prehistory to the events of September 11.’ But that is to ignore a good deal of prior political history that is essential to any adequate understanding. It would be a mistake, however, to think that genealogy focuses only on what is forgotten, ignored or left out. Zehfuss also drew attention to the politics of memory. She pointed out that both Osama bin Laden and President George W.  Bush wanted the world to remember the events of 9/11. Bin Laden wanted the world to remember the humbling of a superpower; Bush wanted the world to remember the loss of innocent life. Both, said Zehfuss (2003: 514), had ‘an interest in our memory of the events’. Zehfuss’s (2003: 525) argument was that a ‘certain way of using memory has become politically powerful’, especially in the United States, where the White House exploited the memory of 9/11 to justify the curtailment of civil liberties at home and an aggressive military response abroad. Her point was that we need to forget the dominant narratives and frames of knowledge before we can fully understand what made 9/11 a distinctive event. That presents a major challenge to the IR theorist, but it is one that post-structuralist theorists have been motivated to undertake.

Textual Strategies of Post-Structuralism One of the important insights of post-structuralism, with its focus on the power–knowledge nexus and its genealogical approach, is that many of the problems and issues studied in international relations are matters not just of epistemology and ontology, but also of power and authority; they are struggles to impose authoritative interpretations of international relations. As Jacques Derrida (2003: 105) said in an interview conducted after 9/11, ‘We must also recognize here the strategies and relations of power. The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to legitimate, indeed to legalize … on a national or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation that best suits it in a given situation.’ This section outlines a strategy that is concerned with destabilizing dominant interpretations by showing how every interpretation systematically depends on that for which it cannot account. James Der Derian (1989: 6) contends that post-structuralism is concerned with exposing the ‘textual interplay behind power politics’. It might be better to say it is concerned with exposing the

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textual interplay within power politics, for the effects of textuality do not remain behind politics, but are intrinsic to them. The ‘reality’ of power politics (like any social reality) is always already constituted through textuality and inscribed modes of representation. It is in this sense that David Campbell (1992) refers to ‘writing’ security, Gearóid Ó. Tuathail (1996) refers to ‘writing’ global space, and Cynthia Weber (1995) refers to ‘writing’ the state. Two questions arise: first, what is meant by textual interplay? Second, how does post-structuralism seek to disclose this textual interplay? Textuality is a common post-structuralist theme. It stems mainly from Derrida’s redefinition of ‘text’ in Of Grammatology (1974). It is important to clarify what Derrida meant by ‘text’. He did not restrict its meaning to literature and the realm of ideas, as some have mistakenly thought. Rather, he implied that the world is also a text, or better, the ‘real’ world is constituted like a text, and ‘one cannot refer to this “real” except in an interpretive experience’ (Derrida 1988: 148). Post-structuralism firmly regards interpretation as necessary and fundamental to the constitution of the social world. But, as Roland Bleiker (2001, 2009) and Michael J. Shapiro (2005, 2007) have shown extensively, matters of interpretation are also aesthetic matters. Recognition of the relationship between interpretation and aesthetics, what Bleiker (2009) calls the ‘aesthetic turn’, does not mean reducing politics and international relations to works of art that can be measured against an ideal of beauty. Rather, it means analysing the relationship between forms of representation and the things represented, and the irreducible interpretive choices that are required. Not unlike artists, International Relations students have to make choices in how they represent or depict an event. Painters, for example, need to choose the time of day, the angle of view, the level of detail, the type of paint, the palette of colours, the brush sizes and so on. International Relations students have similar choices to make: the time frame, the perspective, the selection of relevant data or facts, the key concepts and so on. All these decisions are necessary, but the individual choices are not self-evident; they vary from one student to the next. And this is why political events are susceptible to different interpretations. There is nothing inherent in events or objects in the world that determines how they must be represented in either words or paintings. Instead, it is the structures of human consciousness and the various interpretive choices we make that shape how we perceive and depict the world around us (Bleiker 2001: 513; Shapiro 2005: 233–234). The important point for us, as Bleiker (2001: 510) shows, is that aesthetic insight compels us to recognize the politics involved in representation itself; that it is not a natural or neutral reflection of reality. This is another way of making Campbell’s point about the narrativization of reality. To tease out the textual interplay mentioned here, let us review two strategies employed by post-structuralism: deconstruction and double reading. These will show how ‘textual interplay’ is a mutually constitutive relationship between different interpretations in the representation and constitution of the world.

Deconstruction Deconstruction is a general mode of radically unsettling what are taken to be stable concepts and conceptual oppositions. Its main point is to demonstrate the effects and costs produced by the settled concepts and oppositions to disclose the parasitical relationship between opposed terms and to attempt a displacement of them. According to the inventor of deconstruction, the Franco-­ Maghrebian philosopher of Sephardic Jewish heritage, Jacques Derrida, conceptual oppositions

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are never simply neutral but are inevitably hierarchical. One of the two terms in opposition is generally privileged over the other. This privileged term supposedly connotes a presence, propriety, fullness, purity or identity that the other lacks (for example, sovereignty as opposed to anarchy, metropolitan centre as opposed to colonial periphery). Deconstruction attempts to show that such oppositions are untenable, as each term always already depends on the other. Indeed, the prized term gains its privilege only by disavowing its dependence on the subordinate or debased term.

Key Concept: Deconstruction Deconstruction is a theoretical mode or intellectual technique developed by French post-­ structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida, aimed at unsettling taken-for-granted assumptions and binary oppositions. It is concerned to disclose the constitutive instability of various construc-

tions, whether texts, identities, practices or institutions. Deconstruction has been taken up by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler as well as IR theorists such as Richard Ashley, David Campbell, Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss.

From a post-structuralist perspective, the apparently clear opposition between two terms is neither clear nor oppositional. Derrida often speaks of this relationship in terms of a structural parasitism and contamination, as each term is structurally related to, and already harbours, the other. Difference between the two opposed concepts or terms is always accompanied by a veiled difference within each term. Neither term is pure, self-same, complete in itself or completely closed off from the other, though so much is feigned. This implies that totalities, whether conceptual or social, are never fully present and properly established. Moreover, there is no pure stability, only more or less successful stabilizations, as there is a certain amount of ‘play’ or ‘give’ in the structure of the opposition. As a general mode of unsettling, deconstruction is particularly concerned with locating those elements of instability or ‘give’ that ineradicably threaten any totality. Nevertheless, it must still account for stabilizations (or stability effects). It is this equal concern with undoing or de-­ constitution (or at least their ever-present possibility) that marks off deconstruction from more familiar modes of interpretation. To summarize, deconstruction is concerned with both the constitution and potential de-constitution inherent to any totality, whether a text, theory, discourse, structure, assemblage, institution or regime of practices. Derrida (2006) has punned on the word ontology by calling his deconstructive method a hauntology, because it is concerned with the way that totalities are always haunted by something they seek to exclude (Peoples and Vaughan-­ Williams 2014: 78). Interestingly, there has been some discussion about deconstruction’s colonial origins (Ahluwalia 2005; Sajed 2010). Robert Young (2004: 32) has argued that the single most important moment in the rise of post-structuralism, including Derrida’s deconstruction, is the Algerian War of Independence. Certainly the Algerian War provides a crucial context for understanding Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction (Baring 2010). But Young (2004: 50) makes the stronger point that ‘deconstruction involves the decentralization and decolonization of European thought’. On this reading, deconstruction holds a natural affinity with postcolonialism insofar as they both offer a critique of the authority and grounds of European or Western forms of knowledge and politics. At the heart of postcolonialism – which grew out of the experience of anti-colonial struggles of the

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20th century – is the rejection of binary oppositions that privilege the Western or European ‘self’ at the expense of the non-Western ‘other’. It involves what Abdelkebir Khatibi (2019) calls a ‘double critique’, which subverts the totalizing knowledges of both the Western and the Arab-Islamic nationalist projects (Oliveira 2020: ch. 5), introducing what Alina Sajed (2019: 98) calls ‘ontological plurality’ into the totalities. Like post-structuralism, therefore, postcolonialism deconstructs commonplace oppositions, such as between the civilized and uncivilized, modern and primitive, colonizer and colonized, by revealing them to be ‘intimate enemies’ rather than mutually exclusive oppositions (Nandy 1983).

Double Reading Derrida seeks to expose this relationship between stability effects and destabilizations by passing through two readings in any analysis. As expressed by Derrida (1981: 6), double reading is essentially a duplicitous strategy that is ‘simultaneously faithful and violent’. The first reading is a commentary or repetition of the dominant interpretation – that is, a reading that demonstrates how a text, discourse or institution achieves the stability effect. It faithfully recounts the dominant story by building on the same foundational assumptions and repeating conventional steps in the argument. The point is to demonstrate how the text, discourse or institution appears coherent and consistent. It is concerned, in short, to elaborate how the identity of a text, discourse or institution is constituted. Rather than yield to the monologic first reading, the second, counter-memorializing reading unsettles it by applying pressure to those points of instability within a text, discourse or institution. It exposes the internal tensions and how they are (incompletely) covered over or expelled. The text, discourse or institution is never completely at one with itself, but always carries internal elements of tension and crisis that render it less than stable. The task of double reading as a mode of deconstruction is to understand how a discourse or social institution is put together, but at the same time to show how it is always already threatened with its undoing. It is important to note that there is no attempt in deconstruction to arrive at a single, conclusive reading. The two mutually inconsistent readings, which are in a performative (rather than logical) contradiction, remain permanently in tension. The point is not to demonstrate the truthfulness of a story, but to expose how any story depends on the repression of internal tensions in order to produce a stable effect of homogeneity and continuity.

Ashley’s Double Reading of the Anarchy Problématique Richard Ashley’s double reading of the anarchy problématique was one of the earliest and most important deconstructions in the study of international relations. His main target was the conception of anarchy and its theoretical and practical effects. The anarchy problématique is the name Ashley gives to the defining moment of most inquiries in international relations. It is exemplified by Oye’s (1985: 1) assertion that ‘Nations dwell in perpetual anarchy, for no central authority imposes limits on the pursuit of sovereign interests.’ Most importantly, the anarchy problématique deduces from the absence of a central, global authority, not just an empty concept of anarchy, but also a description of international relations as power politics, characterized by self-interest, Realpolitik, the routine resort to force and so on. The main brunt of Ashley’s analysis is to problematize this deduction of power politics from the lack of central rule. Ashley’s many analyses of the anarchy problématique can be understood in

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terms of double reading. The first reading assembles the constitutive features, or ‘hard core’ of the anarchy problématique, while the second reading disassembles the constitutive elements of the anarchy problématique, showing how it rests on a series of questionable theoretical suppositions or exclusions. In the first reading, Ashley outlines the anarchy problématique in conventional terms. He describes not just the absence of any overarching authority, but the presence of a multiplicity of states in the international system, none of which can lay down the law to the others. Further, the states that comprise this system have their own identifiable interests, capabilities, resources and territory. The second reading is interruptive (Weber 2011), questioning the selfevidence of international relations as an anarchical realm of power politics. The initial target in this double reading is the opposition between sovereignty and anarchy, where sovereignty is valorized as a regulative ideal, and anarchy is regarded as the absence or negation of sovereignty. Anarchy takes on meaning only as the antithesis of sovereignty. Moreover, sovereignty and anarchy are taken to be mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive. Ashley demonstrates, however, that the anarchy problématique works only by making certain assumptions regarding sovereign states. If the dichotomy between sovereignty and anarchy is to be tenable at all, then inside the sovereign state must be found a domestic realm of identity, homogeneity, order and progress guaranteed by legitimate force; and outside must lie an anarchical realm of difference, heterogeneity, disorder and threat, recurrence and repetition. But to represent sovereignty and anarchy in this way (that is, as mutually exclusive and exhaustive) depends on converting differences within sovereign states into differences between sovereign states (Ashley 1988: 257). Sovereign states must expunge any traces of anarchy that reside within them in order to make good the distinction between sovereignty and anarchy. Internal dissent and what Ashley (1987, 1989b) calls ‘transversal struggles’, which cast doubt over the idea of a clearly identifiable and demarcated sovereign identity, must be repressed or denied to make the anarchy problématique meaningful. In particular, the opposition between sovereignty and anarchy rests on the idea of a ‘well-bounded sovereign entity possessing its own “internal” hegemonic centre of decisionmaking capable of reconciling “internal” conflicts and capable, therefore, of projecting a singular presence’ (Ashley 1988: 245), a self-­possessed state at one with itself. But, as Tom Lundborg (2016: 100) declares, all such presences are ‘necessarily haunted’ by the ‘lack of self-presence’. The general effect of the anarchy problématique is to confirm the opposition between sovereignty and anarchy as mutually exclusive and exhaustive. This has two particular effects: (1) to represent a domestic domain of sovereignty as a stable, legitimate foundation of modern political community, and (2) to represent the domain beyond sovereignty as dangerous and anarchical. These effects depend on what Ashley (1988: 256) calls a ‘double exclusion’. They are possible only if, on the one hand, a single representation of sovereign identity can be imposed and, on the other hand, if this representation can be made to appear natural and indisputable. The double reading interrupts and problematizes the anarchy problématique by posing two questions: first, what happens to the anarchy problématique if it is not so clear that fully present and completed sovereign states are ontologically primary or unitary? And, second, what happens to the anarchy problématique if the lack of central global rule is not overwritten with assumptions about power politics?

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Problematizing Sovereign States States, sovereignty and violence are long-standing themes in the established traditions of international relations that gained renewed importance after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They are also central themes in post-structuralist approaches to international relations. However, rather than adopt them uncritically from traditional approaches, post-structuralism revises them in view of insights gained from genealogy and deconstruction. Post-structuralism addresses a crucial issue regarding interpretations and explanations of the sovereign state that state-centric approaches have obscured – namely, its historical constitution and reconstitution as the primary mode of subjectivity in world politics. This returns us to the type of question posed by Foucault’s genealogy: how, and by virtue of what political practices and representations, is the sovereign state instituted as the normal mode of international subjectivity? Posing the question in this manner directs attention, in Nietzschean fashion, less to what is the essence of the sovereign state than to how the sovereign state is made possible, how it is naturalized and how it is made to appear as if it had an essence. To the extent that post-structuralism seeks to account for the conditions that make possible the phenomenon of the state as something which concretely affects the experience of everyday life, it is phenomenological. Yet this is no ordinary phenomenology. It might best be called a ‘quasi-­ phenomenology’ for, as already noted, it is equally concerned with accounting for those conditions that destabilize the phenomenon or defer its complete actualization. In this section, post-­ structuralism’s quasi-phenomenology of the state will be explained. This comprises four main elements: (1) a genealogical analysis of the modern state’s ‘origins’ in violence, (2) an account of boundary inscription, (3) a deconstruction of identity as defined in security and foreign policy discourses and (4) a revised interpretation of statecraft. The overall result is to rethink the ontological structure of the sovereign state in order to respond properly to the question of how the sovereign state is (re)constituted as the normal mode of subjectivity in international relations.

Violence Modern political thought has attempted to transcend illegitimate forms of rule (such as tyranny and despotism) where power is unconstrained, unchecked, arbitrary and violent, by founding legitimate, democratic forms of government where authority is subject to law. In modern politics, it is reason rather than power or violence that has become the measure of legitimacy. However, as Campbell and Dillon (1993: 161) point out, the relationship between politics and violence in modernity is deeply ambiguous for, on the one hand, violence ‘constructs the refuge of the sovereign community’ and, on the other hand, it is ‘the condition from which the citizens of that community must be protected’. The paradox here is that violence is both poison and cure. The link between violence and the state is revealed in Bradley Klein’s genealogy of the state as strategic subject. Klein’s (1994: 139) broad purpose in Strategic Studies and World Order was to analyse ‘the violent making and remaking of the modern world’. His more particular purpose was to explain the historical emergence of war-making states. Rather than assume their existence, as realists and neo-realists tend to, Klein examined how political units emerge in history that are capable of relying upon force to distinguish a domestic political space from an exterior one. Consistent with other post-structuralists, he argued that ‘states rely upon violence to constitute

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themselves as states’, and in the process, ‘impose differentiations between the internal and external’ (1994: 38). Strategic violence is constitutive of states; it does not merely ‘patrol the frontiers’ of the state, but it ‘helps constitute them as well’ (1994: 3). The point made by post-structuralism regarding violence in modern politics needs to be clearly differentiated from traditional approaches. In general, traditional accounts take violent confrontation to be a normal and regular occurrence in international relations. The condition of anarchy is thought to incline states to war as there is nothing to stop wars from occurring. Violence is not constitutive in such accounts as these, but is ‘configurative’ or ‘positional’ (Ruggie 1993: 162– 163). The ontological structure of the states is taken to be set up already before violence is undertaken. Violence merely modifies the territorial configuration, or is an instrument for power-political, strategic manoeuvres in the distribution or hierarchy of power. Post-structuralism, however; exposes the constitutive role of violence in modern political life. Violence is fundamental to the ontological structuring of states, and is not merely something that already fully formed states use for power-political reasons. Violence is, according to post-structuralism, inaugural as well as augmentative. This argument about the intimate and paradoxical relationship between violence and political order is taken even further by Jenny Edkins, who places the Nazis and NATO, concentration camps and refugee camps on the same biopolitical continuum. All, she claims, are determined by a sovereign power that seeks to extend control over biological or bare life. She argues that even humanitarianism can be placed on the spectrum of violence since it, too, is complicit with the modern state’s order of sovereign power and violence, notwithstanding claims to the contrary. Indeed, she says that famine-relief camps are like concentration camps since they are both sites of ‘arbitrary decisions between life and death, where aid workers are forced to choose which of the starving they are unable to help’ (Edkins 2000: 13). Famine victims appear only as ‘bare life’ to be ‘saved’; stripped of their social and cultural being, they are depoliticized, their political voices ignored (2000: 13–14). In different language, Campbell (1998b: 506) affirms this view by arguing that prevailing forms of humanitarianism construct people as victims, ‘incapable of acting without intervention’. This insufficiently political or humane form of humanitarianism, therefore, ‘is deeply implicated in the production of a sovereign political power that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence’ (Edkins 2000: 18). Mick Dillon and Julian Reid offer a similar reading of humanitarian responses to ‘complex emergencies’, but rather than assume an equivalence between humanitarianism and sovereign power, they see a susceptibility of the former to the operations of the latter. Global governance, they say, ‘quite literally threatens nongovernmental and humanitarian agencies with recruitment into the very structures and practices of power against which they previously defined themselves’ (Dillon and Reid 2000: 121). Edkins and Dillon and Reid draw upon an influential and richly textured argument advanced by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Following Carl Schmitt, Agamben posits sovereignty as the essence of the political. The sovereign claims the right to decide the exception. This leads, among other things, to the sovereign’s right to decide who is in and who is out of a political community. If one of the main concerns of critical theory (as outlined in Chapter 7) is examining the possibilities for more inclusive forms of community, Agamben focuses on exclusion as a condition of possibility of political community. He argues that ‘In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men’ (Agamben 1998: 7). ‘Bare life’, most basically, is the simple biological fact

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of not being dead. But Agamben assigns a further meaning to bare life, a meaning captured in the term homo sacer (sacred man), which refers to a life that can be taken but not sacrificed, a holy but damned life. Banished from society, homo sacer acts as the ‘constitutive outside’ to political life. But, in truth, homo sacer is neither inside nor outside political community in any straightforward sense. Instead, he occupies a ‘zone of indistinction’ or ‘no-man’s land’. Indeed, as Agamben (1998: 74, 80) points out, the Roman concept of homo sacer precedes the distinction between sacred and profane, which is why, paradoxically, a so-called ‘sacred man’ can be killed. The clearest expression of this was the system of camps established under the Nazis before and during the Second World War. But similar systems were established during the Bosnian war. As David Campbell (2002b: 157) spells out, the Bosnian Serb camps at Omarska and Trnopolje were ‘extra-­ legal spaces’ integrated into an ‘ethnic-cleansing strategy based on an exclusive and homogeneous’ political community. Judith Butler, in an essay titled ‘Indefinite Detention’ (in Butler 2004), applies Agamben’s arguments in her reflections on America’s war on terror. Drawing from Agamben’s writing on sovereign power, she notes how states suspend the rule of law by invoking a state of emergency. There can be no more significant act demonstrating the state’s sovereignty than withdrawing or suspending the law. Referring to the controversial detainment of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Butler says: ‘It is not just that constitutional protections are indefinitely suspended, but that the state (in its augmented executive function) arrogates to itself the right to suspend the Constitution or to manipulate the geography of detentions and trials so that constitutional and international rights are effectively suspended’ (Butler 2004: 63–64). The detainees are thus reduced to bare life in a no-man’s land beyond the law. Butler (2004: 68) observes that ‘to be detained indefinitely … is precisely to have no definitive prospect for a reentry into the political fabric of life, even as one’s situation is highly, if not fatally, politicized’. One of the most impressive attempts to deal with these issues in International Relations is to be found in the work of Andrew Neal (2009). Engaging with the writings of Schmitt, Agamben and Foucault, Neal provides a persuasive account of why arguments about compromising principles of liberty under necessitous conditions remain so powerful politically. He shows that ‘exceptionalism’  – the array of practices by which states suspend liberty and the rule of law to confront a threat – is a well-established part of political discourse. Far from being an anomaly or aberration, the ‘state of exception’ is symptomatic of biopolitical discourses, constituting the limit of liberal practices of state sovereignty. By engaging with Agamben, Foucault and, more critically, Schmitt, these post-structuralist works seek to show how sovereign states, even liberal-democratic ones, constitute themselves through exclusion and violence justified by exceptionalism.

Boundaries To inquire into the state’s (re)constitution, as post-structuralism does, is partly to inquire into the ways in which global political space is partitioned. The world is not naturally divided into differentiated political spaces, and nor is there a single authority to carve up the world. This necessarily leads to a focus on what Dillon and Everard (1992: 282) call the ‘boundary question’ and what Nick Vaughan-Williams (2009) calls ‘border politics’. Post-structuralism is less concerned with what sovereignty is than how it is spatially and temporally produced and how it is circulated. How is a certain configuration of space and power instituted? And with what consequences? The obvious implication of these questions is that the

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prevailing mode of political subjectivity in international relations (the sovereign state) is neither natural nor necessary. As Gearóid Ó. Tuathail (1996: 1) affirms, ‘[g]eography is about power. Although often assumed to be innocent, the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space.’ There is no necessary reason why global political space has to be divided as it is, and with the same bearing. Of crucial importance in this differentiation of political space is the inscription of boundaries. Marking boundaries is not an innocent, pre-political act. It is a political act with profound political implications, as it is fundamental to the production and delimitation of political space. There is no political space in advance of boundary inscription. As a ‘central feature of the architecture of global politics’ (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 3) and the modern geopolitical imaginary, boundaries function to divide an interior, sovereign space from an exterior, pluralistic, anarchical space. The opposition between sovereignty and anarchy rests on the possibility of clearly dividing a domesticated political space from an undomesticated outside. It is in this sense that boundary inscription is a defining moment of the sovereign state. Indeed, neither sovereignty nor anarchy would be possible without the inscription of a boundary to divide political space. This ‘social inscription of global space’, to use Ó. Tuathail’s (1996: 61) phrase, produces the effect of completed, bounded states, usually built around what Campbell (1998a: 11) calls the ‘nationalist imaginary’. However, as Connolly (1994: 19) points out, boundaries are highly ambiguous since they ‘form an indispensable protection against violation and violence; but the divisions they sustain in doing so also carry cruelty and violence’. At stake here is a series of questions regarding boundaries: how boundaries are constituted, what moral and political status they are accorded, how they operate simultaneously to include and exclude and how they simultaneously produce order and violence. Clearly, these questions are not just concerned with the location of cartographic boundaries, but with how these cartographic boundaries serve to represent, limit and legitimate a political identity. But how, through which political practices and representations, are boundaries inscribed? And what are the implications for the mode of subjectivity produced?

Identity There is, as Rob Walker (1995a: 35–36) notes, a privileging of spatiality in modern political thought and practice. By differentiating political spaces, boundaries are fundamental to the modern world’s preference for the ‘entrapment of politics’ within discrete state boundaries (Magnusson 1996: 36). Post-structuralism asks how political identity has been imposed by spatial practices and representations of domestication and distancing. And how has the concept of a territorially defined self been constructed in opposition to a threatening other? Of utmost importance here are issues of how security is conceived in spatial terms and how threats and dangers are defined and articulated, giving rise to particular conceptions of the state as a secure political subject. Debbie Lisle (2000, 2016) has shown how even modern tourism participates in the reproduction of this spatialized conception of security. By continuously reaffirming the distinction between ‘safety here and now’ and ‘danger there and then’, tourist practices help sustain the geopolitical security discourse. Her reading suggests that war and tourism, rather than being two distinct and opposed social practices, are actually intimately connected by virtue of being governed by the same global security discourse.

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A detailed account of the relationship between the state, violence and identity is to be found in David Campbell’s post-structuralist account of the Bosnian war, in National Deconstruction (1998a). His central argument is that a particular norm of community has governed the intense violence of the war. This norm, which he calls ‘ontopology’, borrowing from Derrida, refers to the assumption that political community requires the perfect alignment of territory and identity, state and nation (Derrida 1994a: 82; Campbell 1998a: 80). It functions to disseminate and reinforce the supposition that political community must be understood and organized as a single identity perfectly aligned with and possessing its allocated territory. The logic of this norm, suggests Campbell (1998a: 168–169), leads to a desire for a coherent, bounded, monocultural community. These ‘ontopological’ assumptions form ‘the governing codes of subjectivity in international relations’ (1998a: 170). What is interesting about Campbell’s (1998a: 23) argument is the implication that the outpouring of violence in Bosnia was not simply an aberration or racist distortion of the ontopological norm, but was in fact an exacerbation of this same norm. The violence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in pursuit of a pure, homogeneous political identity is simply a continuation, albeit extreme, of the same political project inherent in any modern nation-state. The upshot is that all forms of political community, insofar as they require boundaries, are given to some degree of violence (Campbell 1998a: 13). Post-structuralism focuses on the discourses and practices that substitute threat for difference in the constitution of political identity. Simon Dalby, for instance (1993), explains how cold wars result from the application of a geopolitical reasoning that defines security in terms of spatial exclusion and the specification of a threatening other: ‘Geopolitical discourse constructs worlds in terms of Self and Others, in terms of cartographically specifiable sections of political space, and in terms of military threats’ (1993: 29). The geopolitical creation of the external other is integral to the constitution of a political identity (self), which is to be made secure. But to constitute a coherent, singular political identity often demands the silencing of internal dissent. There can be internal others that endanger a certain conception of the self, and must be necessarily expelled, disciplined or contained. Identity, it can be surmised, is an effect forged, on the one hand, by disciplinary practices that attempt to normalize a population, giving it a sense of unity, and, on the other, by exclusionary practices that attempt to secure the domestic identity through processes of spatial differentiation and various diplomatic, military and defence practices. There is a supplementary relationship between the containment of domestic and foreign others, which helps to constitute political identity by expelling ‘from the resultant “domestic” space … all that comes to be regarded as alien, foreign and dangerous’ (Campbell 1992: chs. 5, 6; 1998a: 13). If it is plain that identity is defined through difference, and that a self requires an other, it is not so plain that difference or otherness necessarily equates with threat or danger. Nevertheless, as Campbell (1992) points out, the sovereign state is predicated on discourses of danger. The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to a state’s identity or existence’, says Campbell (1992: 12), ‘it is its condition of possibility’. The possibility of identifying the United States as a political subject, for example, rested, during the Cold War, on the ability to impose an interpretation of the Soviet Union as an external threat and the capacity of the US government to contain internal threats (1992: ch. 6). Indeed, the pivotal concept of containment takes on a Janus-faced quality as it is simultaneously turned inwards and outwards to deal with threatening others, as Campbell (1992: 175) suggests. The end result of the strategies of containment was to ground identity in a territorial state.

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It is important to recognize that political identities do not exist prior to the differentiation of self and other. The main issue is how something that is different becomes conceptualized as a threat or danger to be contained, disciplined, negated or excluded. There may be an irreducible possibility that difference will slide into opposition, danger or threat, but there is no necessity. Political identity need not be constituted against, and at the expense of, others, but the prevailing discourses and practices of security and foreign policy tend to reproduce this reasoning. Moreover, this relation to others must be recognized as a morally and politically loaded relation. The effect is to allocate the other to an inferior moral space, and to arrogate the self to a superior one. As Campbell (1992: 85) puts it, ‘the social space of inside/outside is both made possible by and helps constitute a moral space of superior/inferior’. By coding the spatial exclusion in moral terms, it becomes easier to legitimize certain politico-military practices and interventions that advance national security interests at the same time that they reconstitute political identities. As Shapiro (1988a: 102) puts it, ‘to the extent that the Other is regarded as something not occupying the same moral space as the self, conduct toward the Other becomes more exploitive’. This is especially so in an international system where political identity is so frequently defined in terms of territorial exclusion. But the process of ‘Othering’ is not only spatial. As Sergei Prozorov (2011) argues, it may also be temporal. He shows how Europe today engages in ‘temporal Othering’, casting its own particularistic and conflictual past as the Other against which it must delimit and identify itself. By virtue of its transformative capacity, Europe seeks to fashion for itself an identity as progressive and peaceful. This also entailed Europe representing itself as the sovereign subject that speaks in the name of history and modernity, in contrast to non-Western peoples whose histories are presented in terms of lack, incompletion and failure (Chakrabarty 2000: ch. 1). Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of ‘provincializing Europe’ seeks to de-centre Europe and question its claims to political modernity. Though his postcolonial approach draws predominantly from post-Marxist theories, Chakrabarty’s recovery of subaltern history as inseparable from European history shares common ground with genealogy and deconstruction insofar as he reclaims subjugated knowledge and challenges the authority and universality of dominant European modes of political thought and practice (see Seth 2011 and Chapter 4 of this volume).

Statecraft The previous section has sketched how violence, boundaries and identity function to make possible the sovereign state. This only partly deals with the main genealogical issue of how the sovereign state is (re)constituted as a normal mode of subjectivity. Two questions remain if the genealogical approach is to be pursued: how is the sovereign state naturalized and disseminated? And how is it made to appear as if it had an essence? Post-structuralism is interested in how prevailing modes of subjectivity neutralize or conceal their arbitrariness by projecting an image of normalcy, naturalness or necessity. Ashley has explored the very difficult question of how the dominant mode of subjectivity is normalized by utilizing the concept of hegemony. By ‘hegemony’, Ashley (1989b: 269) means not an ‘overarching ideology or cultural matrix’, but ‘an ensemble of normalized knowledgeable practices, identified with a particular state and domestic society … that is regarded as a practical paradigm of sovereign political subjectivity and conduct’. ‘Hegemony’ refers to the projection and circulation of an ‘exemplary’ model, which functions as a regulative ideal. Of course, the distinguishing characteristics of

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the exemplary model are not fixed, but are historically and politically conditioned. The sovereign state, as the currently dominant mode of subjectivity, is by no means natural. As Ashley (1989b: 267) remarks, sovereignty is fused to certain ‘historically normalized interpretations of the state, its competencies, and the conditions and limits of its recognition and empowerment’. The fusion of the state to sovereignty is, therefore, conditioned by changing historical and cultural representations and practices that serve to produce a particular form of political subjectivity. This is an idea considered by Derrida in one of his last books, Rogues (2005). In it he explored the way that state sovereignty presupposes a particular form of self-hood that is the function of a distinctively modern kind of self-positing or self-positioning (Derrida 2005: 11–12). Derrida’s last ruminations on subjectivity include analysis of how the state’s autonomy is inseparable from its auto-immune or suicidal tendencies (Derrida 2003: 94–109; 2005: 45). That is, states carry the potential to threaten the very things that can help sustain or secure their subjectivity. A primary function of the exemplary model is to negate alternative conceptions of subjectivity or to devalue them as underdeveloped, incomplete or deviant. Anomalies are contrasted with the ‘proper’, ‘normal’ or ‘exemplary’ model. For instance, ‘failed states’, ‘rogue states’ and ‘terrorist states’ represent empirical cases of ‘pathological’ states that deviate from the norm by failing to display the recognizable or preferred signs of sovereign statehood (Constantinou 2004: 17; Bleiker 2005). In this failure, they help to reinforce hegemonic modes of subjectivity, and to reconfirm not just the sovereignty/anarchy opposition, but the presumed superiority of the North (Devetak 2008). In order for the model of sovereign subjectivity to have any power at all, though, it must be replicable; it must be seen as a universally effective mode of subjectivity that can be invoked and instituted at any site. The pressures applied on states to conform to normalized modes of subjectivity are complex and various, and emanate both internally and externally. Some pressures are quite explicit, such as military intervention, and others less so, such as conditions attached to foreign aid, diplomatic recognition and general processes of socialization. The point is that modes of subjectivity achieve dominance in space and time through the projection and imposition of power. How has the state been made to appear as if it had an essence? The short answer is by the performative enactment of various domestic and foreign policies, or what might more simply be called ‘statecraft’, with the emphasis on ‘craft’. Traditionally, ‘statecraft’ refers to the various policies and practices undertaken by states to pursue their objectives in the international arena. The assumption underlying this definition is that the state is already a fully formed, or bounded, entity before it negotiates its way in this arena. The revised notion of statecraft advanced by post-structuralism stresses the ongoing political practices that found and maintain the state, having the effect of keeping the state in perpetual motion. As Richard Ashley (1987: 410) stressed in his path-breaking article, subjects have no existence prior to political practice. Sovereign states emerge on the plane of historical and political practices. This suggests it is better to understand the state as performatively constituted, having no identity apart from the ceaseless enactment of the ensemble of foreign and domestic policies, security and defence strategies, protocols of treaty-making and representational practices at the United Nations, among other things. The state’s ‘being’ is thus an effect of performativity. By ‘performativity’ we must understand the continued iteration of a norm or set of norms, not simply a singular act, which produces the very thing it names. As Weber (1998: 90) explains, ‘the identity of the state is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its result’.

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It is in this sense that David Campbell (1998a: ix–x), in his account of the war in Bosnia, focuses on what he calls ‘metaBosnia’, by which he means ‘the array of practices through which Bosnia … comes to be’. To help come to terms with the ceaseless production of Bosnia as a state or subject, Campbell recommends that we recognize that we are never dealing with a given, a priori state of Bosnia, but with metaBosnia  – that is, the performative constitution of ‘Bosnia’ through a range of entraining and differentiating practices. ‘Bosnia’, like any other state, is always under a process of construction. To summarize, then, the sovereign state, as Weber (1998: 78) says, is the ‘ontological effect of practices which are performatively enacted’. As she explains, ‘sovereign nation-states are not pre-­ given subjects but subjects in process’ (1998), where the phrase ‘subjects in process’ should also be understood to mean ‘subjects on trial’ (as the French ‘en procès’ implies). This leads to an interpretation of the state (as subject) as always in the process of being constituted, but never quite achieving that final moment of completion (Edkins and Pin-Fat 1999: 1). The state thus should not be understood as if it were a prior presence, but instead should be seen as the simulated presence produced by the processes of statecraft. It is never fully complete but is in a constant process of ‘becoming-state’. Though ‘never fully realized, [the state] is in a continual process of concretization’ (Doty 1999: 593). The upshot is that, for post-structuralism, there is statecraft, but there is no completed state (Devetak 1995a). Lest it be thought that post-structuralist theories of international relations mark a return to realist state-centrism, some clarification will be needed to explain its concern with the sovereign state. Post-structuralism does not seek to explain world politics by focusing on the state alone, nor does it take the state as given. Instead, as Ashley’s double reading of the anarchy problématique testifies, it seeks to explain the conditions that make possible such an explanation and the costs consequent on such an approach. What is lost by taking a state-centric perspective? And most importantly, to what aspects of world politics does state-centrism remain blind?

 eyond the Paradigm of Sovereignty: Rethinking B the Political One of the central implications of post-structuralism is that the paradigm of sovereignty has impoverished our political imagination and restricted our comprehension of the dynamics of world politics. In this section, we review post-structuralist attempts to develop a new conceptual language to represent world politics beyond the terms of state-centrism in order to rethink the concept of the political. For Walker (2010: 184), this means confronting sovereignty as ‘a problem’ rather than a ‘permanent or disappearing condition’. Campbell (1996: 19) asks the question: ‘Can we represent world politics in a manner less indebted to the sovereignty problematic?’ The challenge is to create a conceptual language that can better convey the novel processes and actors in modern (or post-modern) world politics. Campbell (1996: 20) recommends ‘thinking in terms of a political prosaics that understands the transversal nature’ of world politics. To conceptualize world politics in that way is to draw attention to the multitude of flows and interactions produced by globalization that cut across nation-­state boundaries. It is to focus on the many political, economic and cultural activities that produce a ‘de-territorialization’ of modern political life; activities that destabilize the paradigm of sovereignty.

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The argument here draws heavily upon the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977, 1987). They have developed a novel conceptual language that has been deployed by post-structural theorists of international relations to make sense of the operation and impact of various non-state actors, flows and movements on the political institution of state sovereignty. The central terms are re-territorialization and de-territorialization (see Patton 2000; Reid 2003). The former is associated with the totalizing logic of the paradigm of sovereignty, or ‘State-form’ as Deleuze and Guattari say, whose function is defined by processes of capture and boundary-­marking. The latter, de-territorialization, is associated with the highly mobile logic of nomadism whose function is defined by its ability to transgress boundaries and avoid capture by the State-form. The one finds expression in the desire for identity, order and unity, the other in the desire for difference, flows and lines of flight. The ‘political prosaics’ advocated by Campbell and others utilize this Deleuzian language to shed light on the new political dynamics and demands created by refugees, immigrants and new social movements as they encounter and outflank the State-form. These ‘transversal’ groups and movements not only transgress national boundaries, but they also call into question the territorial organization of modern political life. As Roland Bleiker (2000: 2) notes, they ‘question the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and frame the conduct of international relations’. In his study of popular dissent in international relations, Bleiker argues that globalization is subjecting social life to changing political dynamics. In an age of mass media and telecommunications, images of local acts of resistance can be flashed across the world in an instant, turning them into events of global significance. Globalization, Bleiker suggests, has transformed the nature of dissent, making possible global and transversal practices of popular dissent (2000: 31). No longer taking place in a purely local context, acts of resistance ‘have taken on increasingly transversal dimensions. They ooze into often unrecognized, but nevertheless significant grey zones between domestic and international spheres’, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, local and global (2000: 185). By outflanking sovereign controls and crossing state boundaries, the actions of transversal dissident groups can be read as ‘hidden transcripts’ that occur ‘off-stage’, as it were, behind and alongside the ‘public transcript’ of the sovereign state. The recent ‘Arab Spring’ might be considered in this context. The ‘hidden transcripts’ of transversal movements are therefore de-territorializing in their function, escaping the spatial codes and practices of the dominant actors and making possible a critique of the sovereign state’s modes of re-territorialization and exclusion (2000: ch. 7). This is also the case with refugees and migrants. They hold a different relationship to space than citizens do. Being nomadic rather than sedentary, they are defined by movement across and between political spaces. They problematize and defy the ‘territorial imperative’ of the sovereign state (Soguk and Whitehall 1999: 682). Indeed, their wandering movement dislocates the ontopological norm that seeks to fix people’s identities within the spatial boundaries of the nation-state (1999: 697). As a consequence, they disrupt our state-centric conceptualizations, problematizing received understandings of the character and location of the political. Similar arguments are advanced by Peter Nyers and Mick Dillon regarding the figure of the refugee. As Nyers (1999) argues, the figure of the refugee, as one who cannot claim to be a member of a ‘proper’ political community, acts as a ‘limit-concept’, occupying the ambiguous zone between citizen and human. Dillon (1999) argues that the refugee/stranger remains outside conventional modes of political subjectivity, which are tied to the sovereign state. The very existence

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of the refugee/stranger calls into question the settled, sovereign life of the political community by disclosing the estrangement that is shared by both citizens and refugees. As Soguk and Whitehall (1999: 675) point out, refugees and migrants, by moving across state boundaries and avoiding capture, have the effect of rupturing traditional constitutive narratives of international relations.

Sovereignty and the Ethics of Exclusion Post-structuralism’s ethical critique of state sovereignty needs to be understood in relation to the deconstructive critique of totalization and the de-territorializing effect of transversal struggles. Deconstruction has already been explained as a strategy of interpretation and criticism that targets theoretical concepts and social institutions that attempt totalization or total stability. It is important to note that the post-structural critique of state sovereignty focuses on sovereignty. The sovereign state may well be the dominant mode of subjectivity in international relations today, but it is questionable whether its claim to be the primary and exclusive political subject is justified. The most thoroughgoing account of state sovereignty’s ethico-political costs is offered by Rob Walker in Inside/Outside (1993). Walker sets out the context in which state sovereignty has been mobilized as an analytical category with which to understand international relations, and as the primary expression of moral and political community. Walker’s critique suggests that state sovereignty is best understood as a constitutive political practice that emerged historically to resolve three ontological contradictions. The relationship between time and space was resolved by containing time within domesticated territorial space. The relationship between universal and particular was resolved through the system of sovereign states, which gave expression to the plurality and particularity of states on the one hand, and the universality of one system on the other. This resolution also allowed for the pursuit of universal values to be pursued within particular states. Finally, the relationship between self and other is also resolved in terms of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, friends and enemies (Walker 1995a: 320–321; 1995b: 28). In deconstructive fashion, Walker’s (1993: 23) concern is to ‘destabilise [these] seemingly opposed categories by showing how they are at once mutually constitutive and yet always in the process of dissolving into each other’. The overall effect of Walker’s inquiry into state sovereignty, consistent with the ‘political prosaics’ already outlined, is to question whether it is any longer a useful descriptive category and an effective response to the problems that confront humanity in modern political life. The analysis offered by Walker suggests that it is becoming increasingly difficult to organize modern political life in terms of sovereign states and sovereign boundaries. He argues that there are ‘spatiotemporal processes that are radically at odds with the resolution expressed by the principle of state sovereignty’ (1993: 155). For both material and normative reasons, Walker refuses to accept state sovereignty as the only, or best, possible means of organizing modern political life. Modern political life need not be caught between mutually exclusive and exhaustive oppositions such as inside and outside. Identity need not be exclusionary, difference need not be interpreted as antithetical to identity (1993: 123) and the trade-off between men and citizens built into the modern state need not always privilege the claims of citizens above the claims of humanity (Walker 2000: 231–232). To rethink questions of political identity and community without succumbing to binary oppositions is to contemplate a political life beyond the paradigm of sovereign states. It is to take seriously the possibility that new forms of political identity and community can emerge that are not predicated on absolute exclusion and spatial distinctions between here and there, self and other (Walker 1995a: 307).

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Connolly delivers a post-structuralist critique that brings the question of democracy to bear directly on sovereignty. His argument is that the notion of state sovereignty is incompatible with democracy, especially in a globalized late modernity. The point of his critique is to challenge the sovereign state’s ‘monopoly over the allegiances, identifications and energies of its members’ (Connolly 1991: 479). The multiple modes of belonging and interdependence, and the multiplication of global risks that exist in late modernity, complicate the neat simplicity of binary divisions between inside and outside. His point is that obligations and duties constantly overrun the boundaries of sovereign states. Sovereignty, Connolly says, ‘poses too stringent a limitation to identifications and loyalties extending beyond it’, and so it is necessary to promote an ethos of democracy that exceeds territorialization by cutting across the state at all levels (1991: 480). He calls this a ‘disaggregation of democracy’, or what might better be called a ‘de-territorialization of democracy’. ‘What is needed politically’, he says, ‘is a series of crossnational, nonstatist movements organized across state lines, mobilized around specific issues of global significance, pressing states from inside and outside simultaneously to reconfigure established convictions, priorities, and policies’ (Connolly 1995: 23). A similar argument is advanced by Campbell. According to Campbell (1998a: 208), the norm of ontopology produces a ‘moral cartography’ that territorializes democracy and responsibility, confining it to the limits of the sovereign state. But Campbell, like Connolly, is interested in fostering an ethos of democratic pluralization that would promote tolerance and multiculturalism within and across state boundaries. By promoting an active affirmation of alterity, it would resist the sovereign state’s logics of territorialization and capture.

Post-Structuralist Ethics Post-structuralism asks what ethics might come to mean outside a paradigm of sovereign subjectivity. There are two strands of ethics that develop out of post-structuralism’s reflections on international relations. One strand challenges the ontological description on which traditional ethical arguments are grounded. It advances a notion of ethics that is not predicated on a rigid, fixed boundary between inside and outside. The other strand focuses on the relation between ontological grounds and ethical arguments. It questions whether ontology must precede ethics. The first strand is put forward most fully by Ashley and Walker (1990) and Connolly (1995). Fundamental to their writing is a critique of the faith invested in boundaries. Again, the main target of post-structuralism is the sovereign state’s defence of rigid boundaries. Territorial boundaries, which are thought to mark the limits of political identity or community, are taken by post-structuralism to be historically contingent and highly ambiguous products (Ashley and Walker 1990). As such, they hold no transcendental status. As a challenge to the ethical delimitations imposed by state sovereignty, post-structuralist ethics or the ‘diplomatic ethos’, as Ashley and Walker call it, is not confined by any spatial or territorial limits. It seeks to ‘enable the rigorous practice of this ethics in the widest possible compass’ (1990: 395). No demarcation should obstruct the universalization of this ethic, which flows across boundaries (both imagined and territorial): Where such an ethics is rigorously practised, no voice can effectively claim to stand heroically upon some exclusionary ground, offering this ground as a source of a necessary truth that human beings must violently project in the name of a citizenry, people, nation, class, gender, race, golden age, or historical cause of any sort. Where this ethics is rigorously practised, no totalitarian order could ever be. (Ashley and Walker 1990: 395)

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In breaking with the ethics of sovereign exclusion, post-structuralism offers an understanding of ethics that is detached from territorial limitations. The diplomatic ethos is a ‘de-territorialized’ ethics, which unfolds by transgressing sovereign limits. This transgressive ethics complements the de-territorialized notion of democracy advanced by Connolly. Underlying both ideas is a critique of state sovereignty as a basis for conducting, organizing and limiting political life. The other ethical strand is advanced by Campbell. He follows Derrida and Levinas by questioning traditional approaches that deduce ethics from ontology, specifically an ontology or metaphysics of presence (Campbell 1998a: 171–192; and see Levinas 1969: section 1A). It does not begin with an empirical account of the world as a necessary prelude to ethical consideration. Rather, it gives primacy to ethics as, in a sense, ‘first philosophy’. The key thinker in this ethical approach is Emmanuel Levinas, who has been more influenced by Jewish theology than by Greek philosophy. Indeed, the differences between these two styles of thought are constantly worked through in Levinas’s thought as a difference between a philosophy of alterity and a philosophy of identity or totality. Levinas overturns the hierarchy between ontology and ethics, giving primacy to ethics as the starting point. Ethics seems to function as a condition that makes possible the world of beings. Levinas offers a re-description of ontology such that it is inextricably tied up with, and indebted to, ethics, and is free of totalizing impulses. His thought is antagonistic to all forms of ontological and political imperialism or totalitarianism (Levinas 1969: 44; Campbell 1998a: 192). In Levinas’s schema, subjectivity is constituted through, and as, an ethical relation. The effect of the Levinasian approach is to recast notions of subjectivity and responsibility in light of an ethics of otherness or alterity (see Campbell 1994: 463; 1998a: 176). This gives rise to a notion of ethics that diverges from the Kantian principle of generalizability and symmetry we find in critical theory. Rather than begin with the Self and then generalize the imperative universally to a community of equals, Levinas begins with the Other. The Other places certain demands on the Self; hence there is an asymmetrical relationship between Self and Other. The end result is to advance a ‘different figuration of politics, one in which its purpose is the struggle for – or on behalf of – alterity, and not a struggle to efface, erase, or eradicate alterity’ (Campbell 1994: 477; 1998a: 191). But, as Michael Shapiro (1998: 698–699) has shown, this ethos may not be so different from a Kantian ethic of hospitality that encourages universal tolerance of difference as a means of diminishing global violence. Campbell (2005: 224) believes that post-structuralism adopts an ‘ethos of political criticism’ that seeks to disturb settled practices and expose the contingently constructed character of political structures and practices. In this respect, post-structuralism is not so far removed from the Kantianinspired tradition of critical theory. As Richard Beardsworth (2005: 224) has rightly noted, poststructuralism, as a ‘critical philosophy’, should not underestimate ‘how much good work reason can do, how much reason can shape contingencies of history, and how much reason can release difference’. This is in part what Derrida (2005) explores in his book Rogues, which is subtitled Two Essays on Reason. The consequence of taking post-structuralism’s critique of totality and sovereignty seriously is that central political concepts such as community, identity, ethics, democracy and civilization are re-thought to avoid being persistently re-territorialized by the sovereign state or claimed by and for European political modernity. Indeed, de-linking these concepts from territory and sovereignty underlies the practical task of a post-structuralist – and perhaps postcolonial – politics or ethics. As Anthony Burke (2004: 353) explains in a forceful critique of just war theory after 9/11,

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post-­structuralism’s conception of an ‘ethical peace’ would refuse ‘to channel its ethical obligations solely through the state, or rely on it to protect us violently’. It should be noted, however, that post-structuralism, as a critique of totalization, opposes concepts of identity, community and civilization only to the extent that they are tied dogmatically to notions of territoriality, boundedness, exclusion and supremacy. The thrust of post-structuralism has always been to challenge both epistemological and political claims to totality and sovereignty, and thereby open up questions about the location and character of the political (Walker 2010: 19).

Conclusion Notwithstanding the myriad accusations and charges levelled against post-structuralism, this chapter has shown that it makes a substantial contribution to the study of international relations with innovative theoretical methods and insights. First, through its genealogical method it seeks to expose the intimate connection between claims to knowledge and claims to political power and authority. Second, through aesthetic insight and the textual strategy of deconstruction it seeks to problematize all claims to epistemological and political totalization by revealing the inherently political choices behind competing interpretations. This has especially significant implications for how we conceptualize the sovereign state, not least because dominant understandings are predicated on practices of capture and exclusion. A more comprehensive account of contemporary world politics must therefore include an analysis of those transversal actors and movements that operate outside and across state boundaries. Third, post-structuralism seeks to rethink concepts of the political and responsibility without invoking assumptions of sovereignty and re-­territorialization. By challenging the idea that the character and location of the political must be determined by the sovereign state, post-structuralism seeks to broaden the political imagination and the range of political possibilities for transforming international relations in innovative ways. These contributions seem as important as ever a decade after the events of 9/11.

Glossary Terms Biopolitics: A form of politics used by governments to sustain the biological health of a population for the purposes of social control and productivity.

Deterritorialization: A Deleuzian concept referring to the movements and flows that evade state capture.

Event: A moment of rupture that breaks through structures of sameness and continuity, opening up possibilities of transformative change.

Ontopology: A neologism formed from ontos (Greek for being) and topos (place) by Jacques Derrida. Refers to the assumed necessity for ethnic or national identity to be aligned with a bounded territory.

Textuality: A literary theory that the world is constituted like a text and therefore can be read or interpreted like a text.

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Further Reading Campbell, D. (1998) National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Fishel, S. (2017) The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Lisle, D. (2016) Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Walker, R.B.J. (2010) After the Globe, Before the World (London: Routledge). Zehfuss, M. (2018) War and the Politics of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

CONSTRUCTIVISM CHRISTIAN REUS-SMIT

10

Constructivism emerged in the 1990s and is now considered one of the major theories of international relations. During the 1980s, two debates structured International Relations scholarship, particularly within the American mainstream. The first was between neo-realists and neo-liberals, both of which sought to apply the logic of microeconomic theory to international relations, but reached radically different conclusions about the potential for international cooperation. The second was between rationalists (Keohane 1988, 1989a) and critical theorists (Ashley 1981; Der Derian 1987; Walker 1987), the latter challenging the epistemological, methodological, ontological and normative assumptions of neo-realism and neo-liberalism, and the former accusing critical theorists of having little of any substance to say about ‘real-world’ international relations. After the end of the Cold War, these debates were displaced by two new debates: between rationalists and constructivists, and between constructivists and critical theorists. Constructivists challenged the rationalism (and to a lesser extent positivism) of neo-realism and neo-liberalism, while simultaneously pushing critical theorists away from meta-theoretical critique towards theoretically informed empirical analysis of world politics. This chapter explains the nature and rise of constructivism, situating it in relation to both rationalist and critical theories. Constructivism is characterized by an emphasis on the importance of normative as well as material structures, on the role of identity in shaping political action and on the mutually constitutive relationship between agents and structures. When using the terms rationalism or rationalist theory, I refer not to the ‘Grotian’ or ‘English School’ of international theory, discussed by Andrew Linklater and André Saramago in Chapter 5, but to theories that are explicitly informed by the assumptions of rational-choice theory, principally neo-realism and neo-liberalism. I use the term ‘critical theory’ broadly to include all post-positivist theory of the Third Debate and after (see Chapter 1), encompassing both the narrowly defined critical theory of the Frankfurt School and post-structural international theory, discussed by Richard Devetak in Chapters 8 and 10. After briefly revisiting the rationalist premises of neo-realism and neo-liberalism, and summarizing the critique of those premises mounted by critical theorists during the 1980s, I examine the origins of constructivism and its principal theoretical premises. I then distinguish between three different forms of constructivist scholarship in International Relations: systemic, unit-level and holistic. This is followed by a discussion of the contribution of constructivism to international relations theory, some reflections on the discontents and limitations that characterize constructivism as a theoretical approach and a consideration of cutting-edge developments in constructivism, including pioneering work on power, culture, practices and emotions.

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Rationalist Theory Versus Critical Theory The nature of neo-realism and neo-liberalism, along with their principal differences, is covered in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. What is clear is that in spite of their differences neo-realism and neo-liberalism have two important things in common. First, they are both rationalist theories. That is, they are constructed upon the choice-theoretic assumptions of microeconomic theory (drawing an analogy between states under anarchy and firms in a market). Three of these assumptions stand out. (1) Political actors – be they individuals or states – are assumed to be atomistic, self-interested and rational. Actors are treated as pre-social, in the sense that their identities and interests are autogenous. In the language of classical liberalism, individuals are the source of their own conceptions of the good. Actors are also self-interested, concerned primarily with the pursuit of their own interests. And they are rational, capable of establishing the most effective and efficient way to realize their interests within the environmental constraints they encounter. (2) Actors’ interests are assumed to be exogenous to social interaction. Individuals and states are thought to enter social relations with their interests already formed. Social interaction is not considered an important determinant of interests. (3) Society is understood as a strategic realm, a realm in which individuals or states come together to pursue their predefined interests. Actors are not, therefore, inherently social; they are not products of their social environment, merely atomistic rational beings that form social relations to maximize their interests. The second thing neo-realism and neo-liberalism share is that they are positivist. They believe the social and natural worlds are amenable to the same scientific principles, and that the goal of international relations theory, like all good social scientific theory, is to formulate law-like propositions about relations between states that can be tested empirically and, once established, used to make predictions about international relations. As explained in Chapters 8 and 10, critical theorists have long challenged the rationalism and positivism of neo-realism and neo-liberalism. Ontologically, they have criticized the image of social actors as atomistic egoists, whose interests are formed prior to social interaction and who enter social relations solely for strategic purposes. They argue, in contrast, that actors are inherently social, that their identities and interests are socially constructed, the products of intersubjective social structures. Epistemologically and methodologically, they have questioned positivist forms of social science, calling for interpretive modes of understanding, attuned to the unquantifiable nature of many social phenomena and the inherent subjectivity of all observation. And normatively, they have condemned the notion of value-neutral theorizing, arguing that all knowledge is wedded to interests, and that theories should be explicitly committed to exposing and dismantling structures of domination and oppression (Hoffman 1987; George and Campbell 1990). Despite important differences between ‘modernist’ and ‘post-structural’ critical theorists (discussed in Chapters 8 and 10), the first wave of critical theory had a distinctive meta-theoretical or quasi-philosophical character. Critical international theorists roamed broadly over epistemological, normative, ontological and methodological concerns, and their energies were devoted primarily to demolishing the philosophical foundations of the rationalist project. Noteworthy empirical studies of world politics were certainly published by critical theorists (Cox 1987; Der Derian 1987), but the general tenor of critical writings was abstractly theoretical, and their principal impact lay in the critique of prevailing assumptions about legitimate knowledge, about the nature of the social world and about the purpose of theory. This general orientation was encouraged by a widely shared assumption among critical theorists about the relationship between theory and practice.

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This was evident in the common refrain that realism constituted a ‘hegemonic discourse’, by which they meant two things. First, that realist assumptions, particularly dressed up in the garb of rationalism and positivism, defined what counts as legitimate knowledge in the field of International Relations. Second, that the influence of these assumptions extended far beyond the academy to structure policy-making, particularly in the United States. Rationalist theories were thus doubly insidious. Not only did they dominate the discourse of International Relations, to the exclusion of alternative perspectives and forms of knowledge, but they also informed Washington’s Cold War politics, with all the excesses of power this engendered. From this standpoint, theory was seen as having a symbiotic relationship with practice, and critiquing the discourse of International Relations was considered by critical theorists the essence of substantive analysis (Price and Reus-Smit 1998).

Constructivism The end of the Cold War produced a major reconfiguration of debates within the dominant American discourse of international relations theory, prompted by the rise of constructivism. While constructivism owes much to intellectual developments in sociology  – particularly sociological institutionalism (see Finnemore 1996) – it also drew heavily on critical international theory, with many of its pioneers employing insights from critical scholarship to illuminate diverse aspects of world politics (see Price and Reus-Smit 1998). Constructivism differs from first-wave critical theory, however, in its emphasis on theoretically informed empirical analysis. Influential constructivists have continued to work at the meta-theoretical level (Onuf 1989; Wendt 1999), but most have sought conceptual and theoretical illumination through the systematic analysis of empirical puzzles in world politics. Constructivists influenced by critical theory thus sought to shift away from abstract philosophical argument towards the study of human discourse and practice beyond the narrow confines of international relations theory. Where first-wave critical theorists rejected the rationalist depiction of humans as atomistic egoists and society as a strategic domain – proffering an alternative image of humans as socially embedded, communicatively constituted and culturally empowered – constructivists used this alternative view of the social world to explain and interpret aspects of world politics that were anomalous to neo-realism and neo-liberalism. And where earlier critical theorists had condemned the positivist methodology of those perspectives, calling for more interpretive, discursive and historical modes of analysis, constructivists have employed these latter techniques to further their empirical explorations. The rise of constructivism was prompted by four factors. First, motivated by an attempt to reassert the pre-eminence of their own conceptions of theory and world politics, leading rationalists challenged critical theorists to move beyond theoretical critique to the substantive analysis of international relations. While prominent critical theorists condemned the motives behind this challenge (Walker 1989), constructivists saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate the heuristic power of non-­ rationalist perspectives. Second, the end of the Cold War undermined the explanatory pretensions of neo-realists and neo-liberals, neither of which had predicted the systemic transformations reshaping the global order. It also undermined any notion that realist theory shaped foreign policy in any direct way, as global politics increasingly demonstrated dynamics that contradicted realist expectations and prescriptions. The end of the Cold War thus opened a space for alternative modes of understanding and prompted critically inclined scholars to move away from a narrowly defined

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meta-theoretical critique. Third, by the beginning of the 1990s, a new generation of young scholars had emerged who embraced many of the propositions of critical international theory, but who saw potential for innovation in conceptual elaboration and empirically informed theoretical development (Klotz 1995: 20; Kier 1997; Price 1997; Hall 1999; Lynch 1999; Reus-Smit 1999; Tannenwald 1999; Rae 2002). Not only had the end of the Cold War thrown up new and interesting questions about world politics for IR theories to explain (such as the dynamics of international change, the nature of basic institutional practices, the role of non-state agency and the problem of human rights), but the rationalist failure to explain recent systemic transformations also encouraged this new generation of scholars to revisit old questions and issues long viewed through neo-­ realist and neo-liberal lenses (including the control of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the role and nature of strategic culture and the implications of anarchy). Finally, the advance of the new constructivist perspective was aided by the declining significance of Marxism as a theory of IR, and by the enthusiasm that mainstream scholars, frustrated by the analytical failings of the dominant rationalist theories, showed in embracing the new perspective, moving it from the margins to the mainstream of theoretical debate (Ruggie 1993; Katzenstein 1996). Echoing the divisions within critical international theory, constructivists are divided between modernists and post-structuralists. They have all, however, sought to articulate and explore three core ontological propositions about social life, propositions that they claim illuminate more about world politics than rival rationalist assumptions. First, to the extent that structures can be said to shape the behaviour of social and political actors, be they individuals or states, constructivists hold that normative or ideational structures are as important as material structures. Where neo-realists emphasize the material structure of the balance of military power, and Marxists stress the material structure of the capitalist world economy, constructivists argue that systems of shared ideas, beliefs and values also have structural characteristics, and that they exert a powerful influence on social and political action. There are two reasons why they attach such importance to these structures. Constructivists argue that ‘material resources only acquire meaning for human action through the structure of shared knowledge in which they are embedded’ (Wendt 1995: 73). For example, Canada and Cuba both exist alongside the United States, yet the simple balance of military power cannot explain the fact that the former is a close American ally, the latter an enemy. Ideas about identity, the logics of ideology and established relations of friendship and enmity lend the material balance of power between Canada and the United States and Cuba and the United States radically different meanings (and hence implications for behaviour). Constructivists also stress the importance of normative and ideational structures because these are thought to shape the social identities of political actors. Just as the institutionalized norms of the academy shape the identity of a professor, the norms of the international system condition the social identity of the sovereign state. For instance, prior to the 19th century, the norms of European international society held that Christian monarchies were the principal form of legitimate sovereign state, and these norms, backed by the coercive practices of the society of states, conspired to marginalize other kinds of polities. Second, constructivists argue that understanding how non-material structures condition actors’ identities is important because identities inform interests and, in turn, actions. As we saw above, rationalists believe that actors’ interests are exogenously determined, meaning that actors, be they individuals or states, encounter one another with a pre-existing set of preferences. Neo-realists and neo-liberals are not interested in where such preferences come from, only in how actors pursue

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them strategically. Society  – both domestic and international  – is thus considered a strategic domain, a place in which previously constituted actors pursue their goals, a place that does not alter the nature or interests of those actors in any deep sense. Constructivists, in contrast, argue that understanding how actors develop their interests is crucial to explaining a wide range of international political phenomenon that rationalists ignore or misunderstand. To explain interest formation, constructivists focus on the social identities of individuals or states. In Alexander Wendt’s words, ‘Identities are the basis of interests’ (Wendt 1992: 398). To return to the previous examples, being an ‘academic’ gives a person certain interests, such as research and publication, and being a Christian monarch in the age of Absolutism brought with it a range of interests, such as controlling religion within your territory, pursuing rights of succession beyond that territory and crushing nationalist movements. Likewise, being a liberal democracy today commonly encourages an intolerance of authoritarian regimes and a preference for free-market capitalism. Constructivists are not opposed to the idea that actors are ‘self-interested’, but they argue that this tells us nothing unless we understand how actors define their ‘selves’ and how this informs their ‘interests’. Third, constructivists contend that agents and structures are mutually constituted. Normative and ideational structures may well condition the identities and interests of actors, but those structures would not exist if it were not for the knowledgeable practices of those actors. The predilection of many constructivists to study how norms shape behaviour suggests that constructivists are structuralists, just like their neo-realist and Marxist counterparts. On closer reflection, however, one sees that constructivists are better classed as ‘structurationists’ (Giddens 1981), as emphasizing the impact of non-material structures on identities and interests but, just as importantly, the role of practices in maintaining and transforming those structures. Institutionalized norms and ideas ‘define the meaning and identity of the individual actor and the patterns of appropriate economic, political, and cultural activity engaged in by those individuals’ (Boli et al. 1989: 12), and it ‘is through reciprocal interaction that we create and instantiate the relatively enduring social structures in terms of which we define our identities and interests’ (Wendt 1992: 406). The norms of the academy give certain individuals an academic identity, which brings with it an interest in research and publication, but it is only through the routinized practices of academics that such norms exist and are sustained. Similarly, the international norms that uphold liberal democracy as the dominant model of legitimate statehood, and license intervention in the name of human rights and the promotion of free trade, exist and persist only because of the continued practices of liberal-democratic states (and powerful non-state actors).

Key Concept: Social Norms Constructivists argue that intersubjective meanings shape actors’ social identities and interests, determine how they understand the material and social worlds, and define the parameters of legitimate behaviour. Such meanings are ‘intersubjective’ in the sense that they are shared between individuals. Constructivists talk a lot about one

category of intersubjective meanings: social norms. They commonly define such norms as shared expectations of acceptable behaviour. In international relations these include expectations about proper diplomatic practice, the rightful use of force, which polities are entitled to sovereign recognition and the protection of human rights.

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Normative and ideational structures are seen as shaping actors’ identities and interests through three mechanisms: imagination, communication and constraint. With regard to the first, constructivists argue that non-material structures affect what actors see as the realm of possibility: how they think they should act; what the perceived limitations on their actions are; and what strategies they can imagine, let alone entertain, to achieve their objectives. Institutionalized norms and ideas thus condition what actors consider necessary and possible, in both practical and ethical terms. A president or prime minister in an established liberal democracy will generally only imagine and seriously entertain certain strategies to enhance his or her power, and the norms of the liberal-democratic polity will commonly condition his or her expectations. Normative and ideational structures also work their influence through communication. When individuals or states seek to justify their behaviour, they will usually appeal to established norms of legitimate conduct. A president or prime minister may appeal to the conventions of executive government and a state may justify its behaviour with reference to the norms of sovereignty – or, in the case of intervention in the affairs of another state, according to international human rights norms. As the latter case suggests, norms may conflict with one another in their prescriptions, which makes moral argument about the relative importance of international normative precepts a particularly salient aspect of world politics (Risse 2000). Finally, even if normative and ideational structures do not affect an actor’s behaviour by framing its imagination or by providing a linguistic or moral court of appeal, constructivists argue that they can place significant constraints on that actor’s conduct. Realists have long argued that ideas simply function as rationalizations, as ways of masking actions really motivated by the crude desire for power. Constructivists point out, though, that institutionalized norms and ideas work as rationalizations only because they already have moral force in a given social context. Furthermore, appealing to established norms and ideas to justify behaviour is a viable strategy only if the behaviour is in some measure consistent with the proclaimed principles. The very language of justification thus provides constraints on action, though the effectiveness of such constraints will vary with the actor and the context (Reus-Smit 1999: 35–36).

Key Concept: Social Identity Constructivists place a lot of emphasis on the social identities of actors. Such identities are said to inform actors’ interests and affect the kinds of social practices they adopt. Social identities are the understandings an actor forms of itself through interactions with others. In other words, we learn

our social identities, they are shaped by how others see us, they are strongly informed by social norms and they are affirmed through our social practices and performances. In short, they are the answers we give to the simple question of ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Who are we?’

Given the preceding discussion, constructivism contrasts with rationalism in three important respects. First, where rationalists assume that actors are atomistic egoists, constructivists treat them as deeply social, in the sense that their identities are constituted by the institutionalized norms, values and ideas of the social environment in which they act. Second, instead of treating actors’ interests as exogenously determined, as given prior to social interaction, constructivists treat interests as endogenous to such interaction, as a consequence of identity acquisition, as learned through processes of communication, reflection on experience and role enactment. Third, while rationalists view society as a strategic realm, a place where actors rationally pursue their interests, constructivists see it as a constitutive realm, the site that generates actors as knowledgeable social and political agents, the realm that makes them

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who they are. From these commitments, it is clear why constructivists are called constructivists, as they emphasize the social determinants of social and political agency and action. In the 1990s, three different forms of constructivism evolved: systemic, unit-level and holistic constructivism. The first of these follows neo-realists in adopting a ‘third-image’ perspective, focusing solely on interactions between unitary state actors. Everything that exists or occurs within the domestic political realm is ignored, and an account of world politics is derived simply by theorizing how states relate to one another in the external, international domain. Wendt’s influential writings provide the best example of systemic constructivism. In fact, one could reasonably argue that Wendt’s writings represent the only true example of this rarefied form of constructivism (Wendt 1992, 1994, 1995, 1999). Like other constructivists, Wendt believes that the identity of the state informs its interests and, in turn, its actions. He draws a distinction, though, between the social and corporate identities of the state: the former referring to the status, role or personality that international society ascribes to a state; the latter referring to the internal human, material, ideological or cultural factors that make a state what it is. Because of his commitment to systemic theorizing, Wendt brackets corporate sources of state identity, concentrating on how structural contexts, systemic processes and strategic practices produce and reproduce different sorts of state identity. Though theoretically elegant, this form of constructivism suffers from one major deficiency: it confines the processes that shape international societies within an unnecessarily and unproductively narrow realm. The social identities of states are thought to be constituted by the normative and ideational structures of international society, and those structures are seen as the product of state practices. From this perspective, it is impossible to explain how fundamental changes occur, either in the nature of international society or in the nature of state identity. By bracketing everything domestic and transnational, Wendt excludes by theoretical fiat most of the normative and ideational forces that might prompt such change. Unit-level constructivism is the inverse of systemic constructivism. Instead of focusing on the external, international domain, unit-level constructivists concentrate on the relationship between domestic social and legal norms and the identities and interests of states, the very factors bracketed by Wendt. Here, Peter Katzenstein’s writings on the national security policies of Germany and Japan (1996, 1999) set the standard for this kind of constructivism. Seeking to explain why two states, with common experiences of military defeat, foreign occupation, economic development, transition from authoritarianism to democracy and nascent great-power status, adopted very different internal and external national security policies, Katzenstein stresses the importance of institutionalized regulatory and constitutive national social and legal norms. He concludes that: In Germany the strengthening of state power through changes in legal norms betrays a deep-seated fear that terrorism challenges the core of the state. In effect, eradicating terrorism and minimizing violent protest overcome the specter of a ‘Hobbesian’ state of nature … In Japan, on the other hand, the close interaction of social and legal norms reveals a state living symbiotically within its society and not easily shaken to its foundation. Eliminating terrorism and containing violent protest were the tasks of a ‘Grotian’ community … Conversely, Germany’s active involvement in the evolution of international legal norms conveys a conception of belonging to an international ‘Grotian’ community. Japan’s lack of concern for the consequences of pushing terrorists abroad and its generally passive international stance is based on a ‘Hobbesian’ view of the society of states. (Katzenstein 1996: 153–154)

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While not entirely disregarding the role of international norms in conditioning the identities and interests of states, Katzenstein draws attention to the internal, domestic determinants of national policies. Unit-level constructivism of this sort has the virtue of enabling the explanation of variations of identity, interest and action across states, something that systemic constructivism obscures. Stephanie Hofmann’s recent work on how dominant political ideologies within European states have shaped their approaches to regional security cooperation is an excellent example (2013). While this form of constructivism is usually better at explaining variations between states’ policies and practices, Hofmann shows how it can also explain converging national policies (Box 10.1). Box 10.1: A Constructivist Interpretation of the COVID-19 Pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic is a quintessential material phenomenon. It is caused by a virus that is transmitted by contaminated water molecules in the air or on physical surfaces, and it infects human bodies, sometimes with minor effects and at other times with deadly consequences. Yet as the pandemic worked its way around the world, it became clear that Marshall Sahlins, the eminent anthropologist, was right that ‘material effects depend on their cultural encompassment’ (1976: 194). Vast differences quickly emerged between states about how leaders and peoples understood the nature and risks of the virus, how vulnerable they were to its spread, what constituted the best health, political and economic responses, how human lives were to be weighed against economic costs, and about questions of moral and political accountability. In other words, the leaders and peoples of different states attached very different meanings to the virus, and in some countries, such as the United States, these meanings were heavily contested, leading to patchy and inconsistent responses. These differences in the meanings attached to COVID-19 have

had profound consequences for human lives. The health disasters of the United States, Brazil and Russia are well known, but even among otherwise similar democracies such as Denmark and Sweden differences in the ideational lenses through which states viewed the virus produced dramatically different results. In July 2021, Denmark had recorded around 2500 deaths for a population of almost 6 million, whereas Sweden had suffered over 14000 deaths for a population only twice as large. And while the material resources available to a state to fight the virus matter, how they have understood the crisis, and in turn responded, has been crucial. Denmark quickly adopted strict lockdown measures to combat the virus, whereas Sweden kept society open to protect the economy while managing the virus. The upshot of all of this is that the material facts of the virus, and the objective material capabilities of states, have not determined outcomes. Rather, it is the shared meanings  – ideas, norms and values – emphasized by constructivists that have been crucial in determining the virus’s effects.

Where systemic and unit-level constructivists reproduce the traditional dichotomy between the international and the domestic, holistic constructivists seek to bridge the two domains. To accommodate the entire range of factors conditioning the identities and interests of states, they bring together the corporate and the social into a unified analytical perspective that treats the domestic and the international as two faces of a single social and political order. Concerned primarily with the dynamics of global change – particularly the rise and possible demise of the sovereign state – holistic constructivists focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between this order and the state. This form of constructivism has focused principally on grand shifts in the development of international systems or orders, and was pioneered in John Ruggie’s path-breaking work on the rise of sovereign states out of the wreck of European feudalism, work that emphasizes the importance of changing social epistemes or frameworks of knowledge (Ruggie 1986, 1993. See also Reus-Smit 1999; Bially Mattern 2005; Nexon 2009; Phillips 2011; Zarakol 2011). Some of the most prominent constructivist work on the development and effects of international norms also

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takes a holistic form. This work, often focused on the workings of human rights norms, shows how non-state actors struggling within states and transnationally to mobilize norms enlist the support of international organizations, and through such processes, compel violating states to change their practices, and in doing so, redefine what can be done legitimately in the name of sovereignty (Klotz 1995; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999, 2013).

The Contribution of Constructivism The rise of constructivism has had several important impacts on the development of international relations theory and analysis. Thanks largely to the work of constructivists, the social, historical and normative have returned to the centre stage of debate, especially within the American mainstream of the discipline. Until the late 1980s, two factors conspired to marginalize societal analysis in International Relations scholarship. The first was the overwhelming materialism of the major theoretical perspectives. For neo-realists, the principal determinant of state behaviour is the underlying distribution of material capabilities across states in the international system, a determinant that gives states their animating survival motive, which in turn drives balance of power competition. To the extent that they discuss it, neo-liberals also see state interests as essentially material, even if they do posit the importance of international institutions as intervening variables. The second factor was the prevailing rationalist conception of human action. As we have seen, both neo-realists and neo-­ liberals imagine humans – and, by extension, states – as atomistic, self-interested, strategic actors, thus positing a standard form of instrumental rationality across all political actors. When combined, the materialism and rationalism of the prevailing theories leave little room for the social dimensions of international life, unless of course the social is reduced to power-motivated strategic competition. Materialism denies the causal significance of shared ideas, norms and values, and rationalism reduces the social to the strategic and ignores the particularities of community, identity and interest. By reimagining the social as a constitutive realm of values and practices, and by situating individual identities and interests within such a field, constructivists have placed sociological inquiry back at the centre of the discipline. Because of the longer standing English School (discussed in Chapter 6), such inquiry had never disappeared from British International Relations. Constructivists, however, have brought a new level of conceptual clarity and theoretical sophistication to the analysis of both international and world society, and this has catalysed a renaissance of the English School (see, as an example, Buzan 2004, 2014, 2018). By resuscitating societal analysis, constructivism has also sparked a renewed interest in international history. So long as International Relations theorists were wedded to the idea that states are driven by context-transcendent survival motives or universal modes of rationality, the lessons of history were reduced to the proposition that nothing of substance ever changes. Such assumptions denied the rich diversity of human experience and the possibilities of meaningful change and difference, thus flattening out international history into a monotone tale of ‘recurrence and repetition’. Historical analysis became little more than the ritualistic recitation of lines from the celebrated works of Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, all with aim of ‘proving’ the unchanging nature of international relations, licensing the formulation of increasingly abstract theories. This approach to history had the paradoxical effect of largely suffocating the study of international history in the

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American core of the discipline. Aided by the momentous changes that attended the end of the Cold War, and also by the ongoing processes of globalization, the constructivist interest in the particularities of culture, identity, interest and experience created space for a renaissance in the study of history and world politics. If ideas, norms and practices matter, and if they differ from one social context to another, then history in turn matters. Not surprisingly, in their efforts to demonstrate the contingency of such factors and their impact on the conduct of world politics, constructivists have sought to re-read the historical record, to rethink what has long been treated as given in the study of international relations. While a similar impulse came from International Relations scholars inspired by the rebirth of historical sociology, constructivists have dominated the new literature on international history (Ruggie 1986, 1993; Welch 1993; Thomson 1994; Kier 1997; Hall 1999; Reus-Smit 1999, 2013; Philpott 2001; Rae 2002; Nexon 2009; Phillips 2011; Zarakol 2011; Towns 2013; Phillips and Sharman 2015, 2020; Phillips and Reus-Smit 2020). Finally, constructivism helped to reinvigorate normative theorizing in International Relations. Not because constructivists have been engaged in philosophical reflection about the nature of the good or the right, a project that has itself been re-energized by the multitude of ethical dilemmas thrown up over the past thirty years (the end of the Cold War, increased international intervention, migration and refugee crises, the global climate emergency, etc.), but because they have done much to demonstrate the power of ideas, norms and values in shaping world politics. While talk of the ‘power of ideas’ has at times carried considerable rhetorical force outside academic International Relations, such talk within the field was long dismissed as naive and even dangerous idealism. Material calculations, such as military power and wealth, have been upheld as the motive forces behind international political action, and ideational factors have been dismissed as mere rationalizations or instrumental guides to strategic action. Through sustained empirical research, constructivists have exposed the explanatory poverty of such materialist scepticism. They have shown how international norms evolve, how ideas and values come to shape political action, how argument and discourse condition outcomes and how identity constitutes agents and agency, all in ways that contradict the expectations of materialist and rationalist theories, and in ways that resonate with the growing awareness among practitioners that soft/smart power matters. While this ‘empirical idealism’ provides no answers to questions probed by international ethicists, it contributes to more philosophically oriented normative theorizing in two ways: it legitimizes such theorizing by demonstrating the possibility of ideas driven international change; and it assists by clarifying the dynamics and mechanisms of such change, thus furthering the development of E.H.  Carr’s proposed ‘realistic utopianism’ (see Price 2008).

Constructivism’s Discontents and Limitations The rise of constructivism has significantly altered the axes of debate within the field. The debate between neo-realists and neo-liberals, which until the middle of the 1990s was still being hailed by many as the contemporary debate, has receded as neo-realism and neo-liberalism, as substantive theories of international relations, have been displaced by less structural forms of realism and a broader spectrum rational-choice approach. The advent of constructivism has also displaced the debate between rationalists and critical theorists. The veracity of the epistemological, methodological and normative challenges that critical theorists levelled at rationalism has not diminished,

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but the rise of constructivism has focused debate on ontological and empirical issues, pushing the meta-theoretical debate of the 1980s off centre stage. The debates now animating much IR scholarship revolve around the nature of power and social agency, the form and future of international order, the relative importance of normative versus material forces, the balance between continuity and transformation in world politics and a range of other empirical-theoretical questions. This does not mean, though, that rationalism and constructivism constitute unified, unproblematic or fully coherent theoretical positions, standing pristine in opposition to one another. We have already seen the significant differences within the rationalist fold, and I now turn to the discontents that characterize contemporary constructivism. Four of these warrant particular attention: the disagreements among constructivists over the nature of theory, the relationship with rationalism, the appropriate methodology and the contribution of constructivism to a critical theory of international relations. It has long been the ambition of rationalists, especially neo-realists, to formulate a general theory of international relations, the core assumptions of which would be so robust that they could explain its fundamental characteristics, regardless of historical epoch or differences in the internal complexions of states. For most constructivists, such ambitions have little attraction. The constitutive forces they emphasize, such as ideas, norms and culture, and the elements of human agency they stress, such as corporate and social identity, are all inherently variable. There is simply no such thing as a universal, trans-historical, disembedded, culturally autonomous idea or identity. Most constructivists thus find the pursuit of a general theory of international relations unpersuasive, and confine their ambitions to providing compelling interpretations and explanations of discrete aspects of world politics, going no further than to offer heavily qualified ‘contingent generalizations’. In fact, constructivists often insist that constructivism is not a theory, but rather an analytical framework. The one notable exception to this tendency is Wendt, who in his early contributions to constructivism embarked on the ambitious project of formulating a comprehensive social theory of international relations, placing himself in direct competition with Waltz. In pursuit of this goal, however, Wendt made a number of moves that put him at odds with almost all other constructivists; namely, he focused solely on the systemic level, he treated the state as a unitary actor and he embraced an epistemological position called ‘scientific realism’ (Wendt and Shapiro 1997). While these represent the theoretical inclinations of but one scholar, Wendt’s prominence in the development of constructivism made them important sources of division and disagreement within the new school. His Social Theory of International Politics (1999) was long the most sustained elaboration of constructivist theory, and for many in the field defined the very nature of constructivism. However, the vision of theory it presents has been vigorously contested by other constructivists, thus forming one of the principal axes of tension within constructivism over the coming years. Wendt has since distanced himself from these early theoretical commitments, and now draws on quantum theory to advance a radical critique of the social sciences, including International Relations (2015). He now considers that constructivism, like other mainstream theories of IR, is hamstrung by a commitment to outdated conceptions of positivist social science, and that quantum physics offers a new way of conceiving both the social and natural sciences. The second discontent within constructivism concerns the relationship with rationalism. Some constructivists believe that productive engagement is possible between the two approaches, engagement based on a scholarly division of labour. We have seen that constructivists emphasize

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how institutionalized norms shape the identities and interests of actors, and that rationalists, treating interests as unexplained givens, stress how actors go about pursuing their interests strategically. The first focuses on interest formation, the second on interest satisfaction. Seeking to build bridges instead of fences between the two approaches, some constructivists see in this difference the possibility of cooperation, with constructivists doing the work of explaining how actors gain their preferences and rationalists exploring how they realize those preferences. Constructivism is thus not a rival theoretical perspective to rationalism at all, but rather a complementary one. ‘The result’, Audie Klotz argues, ‘is a reformulated, complementary research agenda that illuminates the independent role of norms in determining actors’ identities and interests. Combined with theories of institutions and interest-based behaviour, this approach offers us a conceptually consistent and more complete understanding of international relations’ (1995: 20). As attractive as this exercise in bridge-building appears, not all constructivists are convinced. Reus-Smit has demonstrated that the institutionalized norms that shape actors’ identities help define not only their interests but also their strategic rationality (1999). Attempts to confine constructivist scholarship to the realm of interest-formation, and to concede rationalists the terrain of strategic interaction, have thus been criticized for propagating an unnecessarily ‘thin form of constructivism’ (Laffey and Weldes 1997). Another discontent within constructivism involves the question of methodology. Critical theorists long argued that the positivist methodology championed by neo-realists and neo-liberals was poorly suited to the study of human action, as the individuals and groups under analysis attach meanings to their actions, these meanings are shaped by a pre-existing ‘field’ of shared meanings embedded in language and other symbols, and the effect of such meanings on human action cannot be understood by treating them as measurable variables that cause behaviour in any direct or quantifiable manner (Taylor 1997: 111). This led early constructivists to insist that the study of ideas, norms and other meanings requires an interpretive methodology, one that seeks to grasp ‘the relationship between “intersubjective meanings” which derive from self-interpretation and self-definition, and the social practices in which they are embedded and which they constitute’ (Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986; Kratochwil 1988/9; Neufeld 1993: 49). These arguments were quickly forgotten or dismissed by mainstream constructivists, who came to defend a position of ‘methodological conventionalism’, claiming that their explanations ‘do not depend exceptionally upon any specialized separate “interpretive methodology”’ (Jepperson et al. 1996: 67). They justified this position on the grounds that the field had been bogged down for too long in methodological disputes and, at any rate, the empirical work of more critical constructivists such as Kratochwil and Ruggie did not look all that different from that of conventional scholars. Neither of these grounds addressed the substance of the original constructivist argument about methodology, nor have the advocates of methodological conventionalism recognized that the similarity between mainstream empirical work and that of interpretive constructivists may have more to do with the failure of rationalists to ever meet their own positivist standards. While today most constructivists employ the conventional methodological techniques of qualitative social science, some of the most sophisticated constructivist theorists still insist on the fundamental differences between the social and natural worlds, and on the necessity of interpretive methods to access the former (see Kratochwil 2018, in particular). The final discontent concerns the relationship between constructivism and critical international theory. It is reasonable, we have seen, to view constructivism as influenced, at least in part, by

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critical theory, and Price and Reus-Smit (1998) argued early on that its development had great potential to further the critical project. Andrew Linklater (1992a) identified three dimensions of that project: the normative task of critically assessing and revising how political organization, particularly the sovereign state, has been morally justified; the sociological task of understanding how moral community – locally, nationally and globally – expands and contracts; and the praxeological task of grasping the constraints and opportunities that bear on emancipatory political action (1992a: 92–94). Arguably, it is constructivists that have pursued the second of these tasks with the greatest energy and rigour. Exploring the development and impact of the normative and ideational foundations of international society has been their stock in trade (along with the work of the English School, discussed in Chapter 5), and some constructivists have worked hard to relate their work to normative international theory (Price 2008). Yet constructivists are divided between those who remain cognisant of the critical origins and possibilities of their sociological explorations (e.g. Onuf 2012; Kratochwil 2018; Adler 2019), and the majority who adopt constructivism simply as an explanatory or interpretive tool (e.g. Branch 2014; Hurd 2017; Risse 2017). Both standpoints are equally justifiable, and the work of scholars on both sides of this divide can be harnessed to the critical project, regardless of their individual commitments. It is imperative, though, that the former group of scholars works to bring constructivist research into dialogue with moral and philosophical argument, otherwise constructivism will lose its ethical veracity and critical international theory one of its potential pillars. The ‘critical’ credentials of constructivism are currently subject to heightened scrutiny, as the field more broadly is criticized for engrained Eurocentrism and persistent gender and racial biases. IR’s reliance on European or Western theories and concepts has been well documented (Hobson 2012), as has its neglect of non-Western experiences, practices and histories (Acharya 2014). Like most IR theories, constructivism was long vulnerable to this critique of Eurocentrism (and much of it still is), but constructivists have also been at the forefront of important changes. Amitav Acharya has been an outspoken advocate of a genuinely ‘global IR’, and has sought to rewrite the history of the field from a global perspective (Acharya and Buzan 2019). Constructivists have also contributed significantly to efforts to broaden IR’s empirical resources, highlighting the global social forces that forged modern international society (Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017) and rethinking orthodox theoretical assumptions through engagement with non-Western cases (Kang 2010; Phillips 2011; Goh 2013; Phillips and Reus-Smit 2020). Like the rest of IR, constructivism has also been criticized for gender blindness at best and gender biases at worst. Most constructivists have studied social norms, (state) identities and practices as though they were gender neutral, ignoring the fact that gendered assumptions commonly structure all of these, with significant implications for the contours and dynamics of social power. Leading feminist constructivists have worked hard to reorient constructivism, showing, among other things, how states are not only socially constructed but deeply gendered (Parashar et  al. 2018), and how the development of international society has been centrally concerned with the construction of global gender hierarchies (Towns 2010, 2013). The racist origins of IR as a field are rightly now the subject of considerable scrutiny (Vitalis 2015), as are the field’s profound neglect of the role that race and racism play in the structuring of world politics (Anievas et al. 2014). Constructivism, critics note, is well placed to address such issues, but has so far failed to apply its relevant insights to social identities, hierarchies and the normative structures of international society to questions of race and racialism (Zvobgo and Loken 2020).

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Cutting-Edge Constructivism In the past three decades constructivism has moved from being the new kid on the block to one of the principal theoretical approaches in the field. Prior to the end of the Cold War, North American textbooks spoke of three great paradigms: realism, liberalism and Marxism. Today, they speak of realism, liberalism and constructivism. But as we have seen, constructivism is a broad church, encompassing several different varieties and a host of tensions and disagreements. Moreover, despite its discontents and limitations, constructivism remains a vibrant, constantly evolving perspective on international relations, spawning some of the most important innovations in international relations theory. In this final section, I explore four of these innovations, concerning power, culture, practices and emotions. The first concerns the study of power, a staple of international relations theory. Traditionally, discussions of power in international relations have been seen as a realist preserve. ‘Absolute power’, ‘relative power’, ‘structural power’ and ‘the balance of power’ are all considered realist conceptions, as are notions of ‘the struggle for power’, ‘power-maximization’, ‘power transition’ and hegemonic stability. Yet as Wendt argued persuasively, the ‘proposition that the nature of international politics is shaped by power relations … cannot be a uniquely Realist claim’ (1999: 96–97). What is uniquely realist is the ‘hypothesis that the effects of power are constituted primarily by brute material forces’ (1999: 97). Events in world politics cast serious doubt on this hypothesis, however. For example, when superpowers have sought to advance their interests by heavily exploiting their material capacities, such as military might and economic preponderance, their standing and influence internationally has commonly depreciated, as the practices of the Bush and Trump Administrations in the United States, Putin’s regime in Russia and China’s current ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy demonstrate. This gap between material capabilities and the power to shape political outcomes has encouraged constructivists to rethink the nature of power in world politics. Three theoretical advances are notable here. The first seeks a more holistic understanding of power that locates the realist conception in relation to other forms. In a highly cited argument, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall distinguish between compulsory, institutional, structural and productive power, showing that realists are really only concerned with the first (Barnett and Duvall 2004). Another advance stresses the non-material sources of power, particularly the importance of legitimacy (which has become a defining topic of concern for constructivists). From this perspective, an actor’s power is not merely determined by the material resources it commands, but by the degree to which other actors perceive its identity, interests and actions as legitimate, as rightful in relation to prevailing social norms and expectations (Bukovansky 2002; Reus-Smit 2004a; Hurd 2005, 2007; Clark and Reus-Smit 2007). The final advance is perhaps the most radical. In a pioneering volume, Katzenstein and Seybert stress the importance of ‘protean power’ in world politics. They argue that IR scholars have understood power as the ability to exert control under conditions of calculable risk. In reality, they contend, world politics is riddled with incalculable uncertainty, and that in such circumstances protean power – which is the product of innovation under conditions of uncertainty – has a profound effect on political outcomes (Katzenstein and Seybert 2018). They illustrate this argument with case-studies on global finance, migration, human rights, terrorism, arms control, climate change and even the global film industry. The second innovation concerns culture in world politics. The study of culture and international relations is closely related to constructivism, an association reinforced by book titles such as

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Cultural Realism (by Alastair Iain Johnston) and The Culture of National Security (by Peter J. Katzenstein). Until recently, however, constructivists have taken ‘culture’ to mean social and legal norms, and they have confined their studies to how these are constructed and then deployed, through argument and communication, to constitute actors’ identities and interests. Culture, understood more holistically as the broader framework of intersubjective meanings and social practices that give a society its distinctive character, has been largely neglected. Yet things have changed since 11 September 2001. Culture suddenly assumed centre stage in world politics, with arguments about religious and civilizational difference deployed as master lenses through which configurations of power and axes of conflict could be understood. This new terrain of debate was ready made for constructivist engagement, and over time two powerful responses have emerged. The first makes a comprehensive assault on Samuel Huntington’s essentialist understanding of civilizations, articulated in his bestseller The Clash of Civilizations. In a recent trilogy of edited volumes, Katzenstein and his contributors advance a radically different understanding of the nature of civilizations as cultural phenomena, and the nature of intra- and inter-civilizational engagement (see Katzenstein 2010, 2012a, b). Instead of being coherent and unitary cultural entities, civilizations are understood here as loose, inherently pluralist cultural constellations. In contrast to much contemporary discourse, they are not political actors with agential qualities; though they can contain within them multiple actors: states, polities and empires. Equally importantly, civilizations evolve and exist in the context of other civilizations; indeed, they are deeply interpenetrated and constituted by one another. The second response concerns the study of religion in world politics. International Relations, as a field of study, had largely written religion out of existence: great founding moments such as the Peace of Westphalia were assumed to have domesticated religion, religious belief came to be seen as an extra-rational (if not irrational) from of consciousness and secularization was considered the natural course of social evolution, in which religion was effectively relegated to the private sphere. The apparent return of religion to world politics thus came as a shock to International Relations, and the overwhelming tendency has been to understand it in essentialist terms (‘Islam is like this’, ‘Christianity is like that’) and to see it as a ‘problem’ (Kaplan 2010). Yet recent constructivist research, of which Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s writings are emblematic, approaches the issue from an entirely different direction, asking how it is the secularist division of politics and religion has constituted modern regimes of political authority, how it has handicapped international relations thought and, most importantly, how it structures contemporary political responses to religion in world politics (Shakman Hurd 2004, 2008, 2015). A common feature of this constructivist work on culture is its refusal to see cultures as coherent, tightly integrated and neatly bounded, and this leads to an emphasis on how cultural meanings are constructed, narrated and mobilized (Reus-Smit 2018. For how constructivist approaches to culture relate to postcolonial approaches, discussed in Chapter 5, see Reus-Smit 2018, 41–42). The third innovation concerns ‘the practice turn’ in International Relations. As explained earlier, although constructivism often appears structuralist, with intersubjective norms and beliefs constituting actors’ identities, interests and behaviour, it is in fact better understood as structurationist. Norms may shape actors and actions in important ways, but these norms only exist by virtue of the routinized practices of knowledgeable human agents. Practices, or what actors do, are thus crucially important to production and reproduction of social structures. This insight, long left undeveloped in constructivism, has now become a major site of theoretical innovation and empirical inquiry. Building on the work of social theorists such as Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu,

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constructivists argue that not only are practices central to social and political life, but also that a focus on practices can enable International Relations scholars to move beyond a number of important theoretical impasses, principally between agency and structure and between the ideational and the material. Practices, Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argue, ‘are patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts’ (2011: 6). The social practice of the wedding is a good example, as is the practice of diplomacy. When understood in this way, practices entwined both agency and structure: they are things done by agents, but take a structural form as well. Similarly, practices also stand between ideas and materiality. Practices are always informed by, and embed, ideas and values, but when they are performed they become material phenomena: concrete things actors do. A focus on practices, it is claimed, thus enables us to move beyond a series of conceptual dichotomies that have ossified debate in the field. More than this, practice theory is proving a particularly illuminating way of understanding key phenomena in world politics. Pouliot has employed the concept to understand the nature and development of security communities and diplomacy (2010), Bially Mattern the social nature of emotions (2011), Brunnee and Toope the sources of international legal obligation (2010) and, most recently, Adler the nature of international orders (2019). The final innovation concerns the role of emotions in world politics. As we have seen, until the advent of constructivism, the dominant theories of international relations – neo-realism and neo-­ liberalism – were rationalist: they treated actors (individuals or states) as atomistic, self-interested and strategic in the pursuit of their interests (a view that remains strong in the field). Reason – especially strategic reason – was considered the dominant form of human consciousness and the ultimate driver of human behaviour. This emphasis on the strategic reason connects with a normative valuing of reasoned action that has long characterized the social sciences, but also wider discourses about rational policymaking. Western political thinkers over many centuries have called for the dominance of interests over passions, and policymakers often hold up the rational pursuit of national interests as the measure of responsible government. In all this, the study of emotions in world politics has until recently been neglected. Yet evidence of their salience is everywhere to be seen, from the renewed embrace of ethno-nationalism and the appeal of Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign to international responses to images of dead child refugees on the banks of the Mediterranean. Such events have prompted a new wave of scholarship in international relations that seeks to understand the nature and political effects of human emotions. Not all of this work has been constructivist, as much focuses on the psychological and neurological sources of emotions. Constructivists have developed a novel strand of this research, however, which sees emotions not simply as the products of individual psychology or neurology, but as inherently social phenomena. While there are some emotions, such as fear of heights, that are not social in any meaningful sense, others such as guilt, shame, pride, envy and belonging only make sense in a social context (Mercer 2014: 515–535). Indeed, as Bially Mattern argues, emotions ‘are energies or capabilities, which are acquired by individuals through complex engagements with objects and others in the world’ (2012: 66). Moreover, emotions are not just forged through social interaction; they can be constitutive of social relations, of community in particular. Emma Hutchison’s pioneering work on the relation between trauma and what she terms ‘affective communities’ demonstrates just this. Highlighting the importance of representational practices, she argues that: [b]y giving voice to or visually depicting what are unique and somewhat incommunicable experiences of shock and pain, representational practices craft understandings of trauma that have social meaning and significance. In particular circumstances, such

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practices and the shared meanings that are produced resonate with shared, culturally ascribed notions of bereavement, loss and solidarity. A community bound by shared understandings and a common purpose of working through trauma may ensue. (Hutchison 2016: 3. For a post-structural approach to emotions and visual analysis, see Helen Berents 2020) As we have seen, power, culture, practices and emotions are not the preserves of constructivism: other theoretical and analytical approaches have perspectives on these as well. What distinguishes constructivist understandings of these phenomena is their emphasis on the constitutive power of meaningful social interactions. Power is not an individual, material possession; it is a quality of social relationships, sustained as much by shared ideas as coercion. Culture is not a product of more fundamental material forces; it has its own dynamics, and it plays an important role in lending social meaning to material phenomena. Practices are not just individual actions; they are shared, routinized and socially meaningful ways of doing. And, finally, while emotions have neurological and psychological sources, they are also inherently social, and it is this dimension that constructivists emphasize.

Conclusion The rise of constructivism heralded a return to a more sociological, historical and practice-oriented form of International Relations scholarship. Where rationalists had reduced the social to strategic interaction, denied the historical by positing disembedded, universal forms of rationality, and reduced the practical art of politics to utility-maximizing calculation, constructivists have reimagined the social as a constitutive domain, reintroduced history as realm of empirical inquiry and emphasized the variability of political practice. In many respects, constructivism embodies characteristics normally associated with the English School, discussed by Linklater and Saramago in Chapter 6. Constructivists have taken up the idea that states form more than a system – that they form a society – and they have pushed this idea to new levels of theoretical and conceptual sophistication. Their interest in international history also represents an important point of convergence with the English School, as does their interest in the relationship between culture and international order. Finally, their initial emphasis on interpretive methods of analysis echoes Hedley Bull’s call for a classical approach, ‘characterized above all by explicit reliance upon the exercise of judgment’ rather than positivist standards of ‘verification and proof’ (1969/1995: 20–38). These similarities, as well as constructivism’s connections with critical international theory, appeared to pose a challenge to conventional understandings of the field. An ‘Atlantic divide’ has long structured understandings of the sociology of International Relations as a discipline, with the field seen as divided between North American ‘scientists’ and European (mainly British) ‘classicists’. Two of the defining ‘great debates’ of the discipline – between realists and idealists and positivists and traditionalists  – have been mapped onto this divide, lending intellectual divisions a cultural overtone. At first glance, constructivism appears to confuse this way of ordering the discipline. Despite having taken up many of the intellectual commitments normally associated with the English School, constructivism has its origins primarily in the United States. Its principal exponents were either educated in or currently teach in the leading American universities, and their pioneering work has been published in the premier journals and by the leading university presses.

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The United States also spawned much of the earlier wave of critical international theory, especially of a post-structural variety, but that work never achieved the same centrality within the American sector of the discipline. One of the reasons for constructivism’s success in the United States has been its emphasis on empirically informed theorizing over meta-theoretical critique, an orientation much less confronting to the mainstream. With success, however, has come normalization, and this has seen the neglectful forgetting, or active jettisoning, of theoretical commitments that were central to constructivism in the early years. Disappearing, in the American discipline, are the foundational ideas that constructivism rests on a social ontology radically different from rationalism’s, that studying norms, as social facts, demands an interpretive methodology, and that constructivism was linked, in important ways, to the project of critical international theory (for a powerful restatement of these commitments, see Kratochwil 2018). Constructivism has, however, been taken up hugely by scholars elsewhere in the world, especially in Europe, Australia and to a lesser degree parts of East and South East Asia. Some of its most prominent exponents, such as Acharya (2014) and Pinar Bilgin (2016), have also become leading voices calling for a less Eurocentric, ‘global’ form of IR.

Glossary of Terms Constructivism: A theoretical perspective that emphasizes the socially constructed nature of international relations. In particular, how social norms and practices shape actors’ identities, interests and behaviour.

Legitimacy: Used in two ways. In the first, it is used to describe an actor, institution or action that commands widespread support (e.g. the UN Security Council has ‘legitimacy’, or it is considered ‘legitimate’). In the second usage, it is a kind of moral claim, in which an observer judges something or someone as legitimate because it satisfies her values (e.g. anti-Vietnam protests were legitimate because the war was wrong).

Normative: A term that describes something that is socially valued. It is used in two ways. The first is to describe something that in a given context is socially valued. In modern international relations, international law has ‘normative’ standing, in the sense that it is valued by states even when it constrains their actions. ‘Normative’ is also used to describe a claim or argument that something is right or good, and as such ought to be socially recognized and valued. The idea that states should intervene to prevent mass atrocities is a normative argument.

Practices: Things humans do. They are more than this, though: they are not just actions. Practices are, as Adler and Pouliot explain, ‘socially meaningful patterns of action’ (2011: 6). Diplomacy is a practice in this sense, as are voting in the UN General Assembly, negotiating a treaty, defending and respecting sovereign borders and providing humanitarian relief.

Structuration: The idea that social structures shape actors’ interests and actions, but that such structures would not exist if it were not for the routinized practices of such actors. Agents and structures are thus mutually constituted.

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Further Reading Adler, E. (1997) ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’, European Journal of International Relations 3(3):319–363. Finnemore, M. (1996) National Interests in International Society (Ithaca). James, P., Bertucci, M.E. and Hayes, J. (eds.) (2018) Constructivism Reconsidered: Past, Present, and Future (Ann Arbor). Onuf, N. (2012) World of Our Making (London). Ruggie, J.G. (2002) Constructing the World Polity (London). Wiener, A. (2018) Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations (Cambridge).

INSTITUTIONALISM TONI HAASTRUP

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Introduction In their 2002 article, leading institutionalist scholars Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol declared that ‘we are all institutionalists now’ (706). While this might exaggerate the impact of institutionalisms on the discipline of International Relations (IR), it is nevertheless true that the study of institutions has become central to understanding actors and practices in the discipline. As Peters (1999, 2019) argues, there is good reason to rely on institutionalist frames for understanding the international. However, and as the rest of this chapter shows, sometimes institutionalist accounts of international politics are known by other names. By engaging with the named and unnamed institutionalist approaches, we gain a holistic narrative of their utility in explaining and understanding international politics (see Milner 1997; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Institutionalist approaches have drawn on grand theories, though the more recent New Institutionalism (NI) has emerged as an important mid-range theory. The application of institutionalist approaches is particularly useful for understanding specific policy processes of international institutions, including regional institutions. For example, Koga (2017) draws on historical institutionalism to explain the transformation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Organization of African Unity/African Union (AU), and similarly the account of Africa– European Union (EU) security cooperation via the AU also finds utility in historical institutionalism to explain the emergence of security cooperation (Haastrup 2013). Indeed, many studies on the EU have moved away from earlier institutionalist approaches, such as functionalism and neo-­ functionalism, and adopted strands of NI to understand integration and policy processes (see Pollock 1996). At the same time, as the EU has gained political power, the utility of institutionalist strands situated within traditional international relations is potentially more relevant. Institutionalist approaches differ, sometimes significantly. They differ in how they explain the role of the institutions, the constitution of the institution and the relationship of political actors to the institution. At the same time, they are all concerned with similar questions about the world. These questions are: 1. What is an institution? 2. How do institutions emerge? 3. How do institutions interact with actors within and outside them? 4. How do institutions change? 5. How do the processes of institutionalism affect policy?

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In their variety, different institutionalist approaches place different emphasis and offer different answers to these questions. Consequently, the task of this chapter is to elaborate on how scholars from different ‘Schools’ have sought to answer these questions and in the context of International Politics. For instance, while all institutionalisms are preoccupied, to a certain degree, with the idea of change, some are more preoccupied with resistance to change (and therefore continuity) than others. This chapter draws heavily on the EU as the frame through which to understand institutionalism as an approach of many theories in IR. It begins with descriptions and genealogies of institutionalist approaches within IR. In describing these varieties of institutionalism, the first part also engages with the context of their emergence and their key proponents. The second part of the chapter examines the applications of these different approaches and how they help us understand matters of international politics. The final section addresses the overlaps with other theoretical approaches, as well as drawing out some of the gaps in institutionalist analysis. Key institutionalist concepts will be highlighted throughout the chapter.

The Institutionalisms: What Are They? Within IR there are many theoretical approaches that fit within the institutionalism paradigm, which refers to a focus on the role of institutions. In other words, institutionalism within IR is more accurately constitutive of institutionalisms that focus on structures, norms, rules, processes and practices of international politics. These theories, despite their preoccupation with institutions, are different in their conceptions of the subject of study and have served different subfields of IR. Institutionalisms have their genesis in the practice of international relations. Between the two world wars, functionalism, through one of its best-known exponent, David Mitrany (1948), emerged as a way to rethink the role of states and non-state actors in international politics. Mitrany’s work of course drew on Leonard Woolf’s idea of international government, which influenced the creation of the League of Nations. Mitrany’s functionalism sought to explain the ways in which states came together. Whereas traditional IR theories such as realism tended to emphasize state actions as motivated by self-interest, functionalism shares the ‘optimizing’ of liberalism, by accounting for the fact that states share common interests. Functionalism seeks to theorize how and in what form these common interests are practised. In his 1948 article, Mitrany takes for granted cooperative organizing within the international system and argues for three categories of organizing, including: a loose association otherwise known now as an intergovernmental arrangement such as the League of Nations or the United Nations; a federal system as exemplified by a country such as Germany; and a functional system or ‘arrangement’. The third way, the functional approach, is illustrated by way of exploring the choices that were available to European states as they sought deeper integration for the specific purpose of peace. While the functional approach provided a third option, it was also presented by Mitrany as a midpoint between intergovernmentalism and full federation. The functional approach, or functionalism, is motivated by the creation of an interdependent system of states or an integrated federation in the service of peace. It challenges the possibility of an international federation and posits for a more realistic system of governance. In the absence of world government and given existing conflicts between states, Mitrany (1948: 360) argues that states can work together through the

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medium of ‘functional agencies’. These functional agencies allow for technical and economic interdependence and cooperation. These agencies constitute institutions of peace governance within the international system with the ability to manage the sources of conflict in areas where states have already agreed to cooperation. In this sense, institutions for functionalist have material characteristics and are bound by shared formal norms and rules. As an approach, functionalism is useful for ‘analysing governments and political processes in terms of how general social functions were performed’ (Navari 1996: 216). It helps to understand and explain global governance. In his The Progress of International Government, Mitrany explained the conditions of change from the known structure of an international system of independent states to one of functional cooperation, which emerges owing to common interests of states and people. However, and fundamentally, when change occurs it is often unintentional, and this is what functionalist scholars find interesting to research (Navari 1996: 221–222). Functionalism has long been associated with European integration. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, scholars of European integration who wanted to understand the processes and form of European integration, rather than just the conditions for or impact of integration, modified Mitrany’s functionalism to create neo-functionalism. Neo-functionalism is most associated with Ernst Haas. Neo-functionalism sees institutions as the outcome of the processes of integration. Haas outlines the utility of neo-functionalism most effectively in Beyond the Nation State, in which he focuses on the ways in which states translate their preferences into an international organization, in this case the International Labour Organization. By focusing on the processes of this international integration, neo-functionalism not only examines the processes of translating national preferences but also demonstrates how the institution repurposes these national preferences for its own goals within international politics. For the most part, neo-functionalism has been quite modest in that it has mainly been applied to the European integration process. Within EU Studies, neo-functionalism highlighted the possibilities of supranational institution-­ building though a focus on society and the market. Elites are important actors for institution-­ building within the neo-functionalist paradigm. They drive the agenda towards supranationalism. To explain the process of institution-building, neo-functionalists argue that in those areas that are not too contentious, shared policy initiatives would allow for functional spillovers into other policy areas. However, for neo-functionalists unlike functionalists, spillovers are not automatic and are likely to be difficult when it comes to deeper political integration. Since spillover is not automatic, elites are instrumental in pushing deeper integration (institution-building). Owing to the normative commitment to deeper integration, political institutions are central to neo-functionalism, underscoring its positioning as a general institutionalist theory of regional integration (see Haas 1961, 1967, 1970; Haas and Schmitter 1964). Functionalism and neo-functionalism are useful for explaining how institutions emerge – as a result of spillovers and synonymous with formal material and political structures. While functionalism emphasizes the importance of spillovers and the role of integrationist elites in institution-building, its popularity begun to wane in the 1970s when critics deemed it too idealistic, questioning the impact of institutions in international politics. While functionalists believe the creation of institutions is what leads to peace, critics suggest that it is the conditions of peace that make room for institutions. Functionalism does not account for the role political elites in driving forward specific programmes, although neo-functionalism has to a certain extent. Yet as EU

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political integration stalled, critics highlighted that neo-functionalism could not account for this, and generally could not account for change. Deeper EU integration in the 1990s revived the utility of neo-functionalism but not to its previous level of popularity (Niemann 2006). While these institutionalist accounts are theories of European integration specifically, scholars such as Stephen Krasner have sought to produce more general theories of international politics, drawing on institutionalist perspectives. One of this is regime ‘theory’. In reality, this is not a singular coherent theory but rather a cluster of ways in which to understand international regimes that are often utilized in the analysis of international organizations, multilateralism and global governance. The place of regime theory as an institutionalist approach was solidified in the International Organization special issue of 1982 edited by Stephen Krasner. Krasner defines regimes as ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1982: 186, emphasis added). Similarly, institutions are ‘formal or informal structures of norms and rules that are created by actors to increase their utility by, for instance, providing additional information or enforcing contracts’ (Krasner 1999: 43, emphasis added). In other words, regimes are institutions and the terminologies are used interchangeably. Effectively, then, regime theory is an institutionalist theory (Young 1982). This is perhaps unsurprising since regime theorizing was happening at the same time as early NI theorizing, though mainly at the level of domestic politics in the 1980s. Regime theory draws from liberalism to posit that international institutions have an impact on international actors. Moreover, it assumes that cooperation is possible despite the anarchic nature of the international system. Regime theory is important because it considers the practices of formal organizations (and actors within them) such as the EU, but also considers the impact of ad hoc or informal groups (Young 1980). Within regime theory is neo-liberal institutionalism, a rationalist approach that challenges realism, though with some similarities. Neo-liberal institutionalism accepts that the international system is anarchical, but that states can nevertheless pursue cooperation through institutions. Research that draws on neo-liberal institutionalism tends to utilize game theory as a way to predict the behaviour of political actors (see Burchill 2020). In general, regime theory is useful for unpacking the impact of institutions on particular outcomes in international politics as well as the role of policy actors in shaping the formation of institutions (see Young 1980). It can also be useful for understanding the variation in institutionalization among and within institutions. Many regime theorists contend that institutions have agency distinct from their members, thus shaping policy issues within their remit. In applying regime theory to international institutions, one is also able to analyse the character of the regime and its scope for action in international politics. Other exponents of regime theory are Robert Keohane and Stanley Hoffmann. Keohane and Hoffmann’s insights have informed European integration politics. Within The New European Community: Decision-Making and Institutional Change, they illustrate the expansive meaning of regimes that is not constrained by singular institutions. For example, they make reference to ‘international economic regimes’ (Keohane and Hoffmann 1991: 6), which is constitutive of not just international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but also the European Community, private banks and bankers, reserve banking institutions, and economic ministries and ministers. Yet Young’s claim that regimes are social institutions stands, in this context.

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In their edited collection, Keohane and Hoffman tried to make sense of rapid changes in European integration after the Single European Act. This is particularly noteworthy since regime theorists, such as John Ruggie and Fredrich Kratochwil (1986), and realists have argued that most regime analyses cannot account for transformative effects of regimes. While realists acknowledge international institutions/regimes as outcomes of cooperation, they differ from liberals on the motivation and possibilities of international institutions. For realists, regimes are tools of powerful states and reflect the preferences and voices of powerful states (see, for example, Strange 1982). International Relations scholar and political economist Susan Strange, for example, shows how the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, including the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the predecessor to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the IMF exemplify this perspective as instruments of United States foreign policy. In parallel to the developments in International Relations that introduced regime theory, political science was having its own reckoning with how to study institutions via NI.  In one of the foundational texts of NI, March and Olsen (1984) make the case that institutions are important for the structuring of political relations. While the focus in their work was more on domestic political relations, their approach has been extended to institutions of international politics. Like the institutionalists focused on European integration specifically, and as an aspect of global governance or the regime theories concerned with international institutions, New Institutionalists agree that institutions affect political outcomes. For instance, scholars in this tradition have focused on how institutional types are critical to understanding the resultant policies such as decisions to cooperate or not, and types of cooperation (Aspinwall and Schneider 2000; Steinmo 2001). March and Olsen (1984) thus proposed NI as a way to understand and appreciate the significant role of institutions in political processes. At the heart of NI are three assumptions about how institutions provide structure for political processes. First, institutions determine the boundaries of who can participate in political processes and also the context of political interaction. Second, institutions influence the political strategies of the various actors involved in particular political processes. Third and finally, within NI, Sven Steinmo has shown that institutions can shape actor preferences (Steinmo 2001: 462; 2008). Kerremans (1996) showed how the EU shaped the preferences of national political elites, who were socialized away from national preferences to those of the European Commission or Council (Kerremans 1996: 232). This, for those who subscribe to NI theorizing, underscores the idea that institutions matter above and beyond most other explanations of political behaviour and decision-making. While there is no single definition of institutions for NI adherents, there are some that are widely accepted such as the one offered by Douglass North. North calls institutions ‘humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’. Rhodes et al. define institutions as ‘reflecting habits and norms, more likely to be evolved than to be created … [or] architecture and … rules that determine opportunities and incentives for behaviour’ (2006: xiii). Meanwhile, Hall defines institutions as ‘formal rules, compliances procedures and standard operating procedures that structure conflict’ (1986: 19), and Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen (2005: 9) define institutions as ‘building blocks of social order … organizing behaviour into predictable and reliable patterns’. John (1998) provides a working definition that is perhaps the most useful for students: ‘Institutions are the arena within which policymaking takes place. They include the political organizations, laws, rules and are central to every political system and they constrain how decision-makers behave’ (John 1998: 38).

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The lack of a precise definition is not necessarily a detriment, however. Cairney (2012) suggests that what NI lacks in terms of precision explains the variety of NIs. Vivien Lowndes (2010; also Lowndes and Roberts 2013) identifies nine approaches within NI theory (see Table  11.1), six more than the classic ones identified by Hall and Taylor (1996). This diversity allows for the application of NI to a broader range of political phenomena, including within International Politics (see Schmidt 2010; Haastrup and Kenny 2016: 199). As this chapter goes on to show, there are many overlaps beyond the three core assumptions already outlined that characterize these approaches to NI (see Table 11.1). This chapter, however, explores those approaches to NI that are especially dominant in the study of international politics: NI is perhaps more explicit about change (and continuity) than the institutionalism that has emerged from International Relations.

Rational-Choice Institutionalism Hall and Taylor (1996) identified rational-choice institutionalism as a theory that privileges the role of individuals within institutions. These individuals are unwilling to deviate from the standard rules and norms for fear that it would be to their personal disadvantage. Consequently, their actions for the institutions are also correlated to their own positions. Rational-choice institutionalism posits a concept of calculus wherein institutions persist because of the cost–benefit calculations that Table 11.1  New institutionalisms Institutional type

Characteristics

Rational-choice institutionalism

Claims that political institutions embody rules and inducements within which individuals attempt to maximize their utilities

Sociological institutionalism

Draws attention to the ways that institutions create meaning for individuals. The actions of these individuals rely on their particular social context

Historical institutionalism

Examines how choices made about institutional design influence the future decision-­ making of individuals (see Hall and Taylor 1996 for a review)

Constructivist/ discursive institutionalism

Emphasizes the role of ideas and discourses within institutions and their impact on shaping behaviour that influence political action through specific frames of meaning

Feminist institutionalism

Concerned with the operation of gender norms and gendered dynamics within institutions (see Krook and Mackay 2011; Kenny 2007). Under the general umbrella of feminist institutionalism are other scholars who simply attach feminism to other NIs such as feminist historical institutionalism (Waylen 2011) and feminist discursive institutionalism (Freidenvall and Krook 2011)

Empirical institutionalism

Seeks to classify different institutional types and analyse their practical impact upon government performance (see Peters 1996 for a review)

International institutionalism

Focuses on the structural constraints of states by formal and informal realities of international politics (see Rittberger 1993)

Network institutionalism

Shows how regularized informal interactions between agents (individuals and groups) shape political behaviour (see Marsh and Rhodes 1992)

Post-structuralist institutionalism

Argues that institutions are able to construct political subjectivities and identities, advancing on constructivist and discursive institutionalism (Moon 2013). Larsson proposes a post-structuralist account of institutionalism that grants agency to discourse in that it ‘possesses constitutive causality, and that its relative influence is manifested through formal and informal institutions’ (Larsson 2018: 340)

Source: This table is inspired by Lowndes (2010: 65) and Lowndes and Roberts (2013: 31).

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individuals within them undertake prior to decision-making. In relying on the concept of calculus, rational-choice institutionalism sees individual actors as the principal subjects within the institution, and their job is to maximize utility. The structure of the institution is thus dependent on the actors within it. Actors are in turn driven by the logic of consequences, which is based on their subjective assessments of the (potential) outcomes of alternative courses of action (Schulz 2018: 914).

Sociological Institutionalism Vivien Lowndes defines sociological institutionalism as a way in which ‘institutions create meaning for individuals, providing important theoretical building blocks for normative institutionalism within political science’ (Lowndes 2010: 65). Whereas rational-choice institutionalism sees institutions as the space needed to maximize benefits without shaping actor preferences, sociological institutionalism focuses instead on the importance and impact of culture. Culture here refers to social values adopted by institutions to maintain their internal and external legitimacy. Institutions in the sociological view can be restrictive on actors, thus impeding the possibilities of change. Sociological institutionalism moves beyond the rigidity of material structures and argues that the embedded practices of the institution affect actor preferences, thus determining institutional identities. Within this sociological framework is the idea of logic of appropriateness. Scholars such as March and Olsen (1984) explain the logic of appropriateness as the ways in which political actors linked to the institution are driven to follow the rules because they believe it is the appropriate thing to do (see March and Olsen 1984: 741). In effect, policy practitioners are governed by a logic of appropriateness that draws on social practices that become embedded within the institution over time. Sociological institutionalist accounts of the EU challenges not just rational-choice accounts but also functionalist accounts. Whereas actors are utility maximizers according to rational choice, sociological institutionalism challenges the idea that institutions are a result of perfect and careful (functional) design.

Key Concept: Logic of Appropriateness Logic of appropriateness, coined by March and Olsen, refers to how decisions are made based on social norms that impact behaviour rather than cost–benefit calculations. When policy practition-

ers act in a situation, the logic of appropriateness is governed by rules that draw on institutionalized social practices that become embedded within the institution over time.

Historical Institutionalism To an extent, historical institutionalism has become the most popular of the institutionalisms, especially on matters relevant to International Relations. Developed in the 1990s, its main exponents include Kathleen Thelen, James Mahoney, Peter Hall Theda Skocpol and Paul Pierson. International Relations scholars such as John Ikenberry see historical institutionalism as an approach that aims to understand political outcomes based on ‘the institutional setting in which [policies] take place’ (Ikenberry 1988: 222–223). Historical institutionalism does this by considering the evolution of the institution. It brings together calculus and culture, a symbiosis between actor preferences and their exogenous (external) impact on the institution and the institutional

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context and its endogenous (internal) impact on the actor (Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Hay and Wincott 1998). Change within the institution is thus only possible owing to the iterative relationship between institutions and individuals. One of the most important insights about institutions from the historical institutionalist perspective is the concept of path dependency (see Box 11.1). This is the idea that ‘past events influence future events’ (Mahoney 2000: 510); specifically, that choices institutions made in the early stages of institutional formation ‘persist, unless there is some force sufficient to overcome the inertia’ (Peters 2019: 82). The persistence of a chosen path is often due to positive feedback at the initiative stage, which makes it difficult for the institution to change direction – and this is further reinforced by the ‘lock-in’ of institutional practices regardless of whether they are still useful to the institution. Overall, historical institutionalism tends to assume that institutions are prone to continuity more than change. Key Concept: Path Dependency A concept associated with historical institutionalism. It refers to the idea that at the moment of institutional design the particular approach taken by policy practitioners, regardless of its effective-

ness or appropriateness, is difficult to change down the line. This is because of the (perceived) high cost of a change of course for the institution.

Yet change is not an impossibility. Within historical institutionalism, such a change is possible after a period of uncertainty or institutional flux that forces actors to take important decisions about the direction of the institution. These periods of uncertainties are known as critical junctures (see Box 11.1). These are ‘relatively short periods of time during which there is a substantially heightened probability that agents’ choices will affect the outcome of interest’ (Capoccia and Keleman 2007: 348). According to Pierson, ‘Junctures are “critical” because they place institutional arrangements on paths or trajectories, which are then very difficult to alter’ (Pierson 2004: 135). In short, while critical juncture disrupts path dependent processes, they also restart new path dependent processes. Key Concept: Critical Junctures Critical junctures come about as a result of political crisis and usually come from external (exogenous) shocks, though not exclusively to the

institution. These critical junctures allow for institutional change.

Mahoney and Thelen (2010) expand on this notion of change by focusing on the patterns that permit change to happen. They call on us to go beyond the dyad of institutions that is either stable or changed by crisis-driven exogenous shocks to consider the possibility of gradual change. In doing so, they identify four modes or typologies of institutional change, as outlined in Table 11.2 (see also Streeck and Thelen 2005). While these three institutionalisms dominate the literature, as Table 11.2 shows, there are several more worth reflecting on in brief.

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Table 11.2  Four typologies of institutional change Mode

Description

Displacement Occurs when existing rules are replaced with new ones, potentially resulting in abrupt change

Example This is rather rare since it involves whole place replacement. Yet the creation of democratic South Africa after apartheid as post-conflict political settlement can be cited as an example (see Waylen 2008)

Layering

Refers to the introduction of new rules over The broadening of EU foreign policy or beside existing ones approaches and towards Africa, beyond poverty reduction and development assistance (see Haastrup 2013)

Drift

Refers to the situation wherein formal rules continue to exist, but owing to shifts in the institutional context they are no longer relevant or used towards the goal of the institution

The new distribution of power-weighted preferences caused by the engagement of rising powers and within the Doha round of negotiation led to deadlock (see Stephen and Parízek 2019)

Conversion

This is the case when rules remain the same but are interpreted and used in new ways due to their strategic redeployment

The G20 created in 1999 was relatively inactive until the 2008 global financial crisis when it was redeployed to weather the crisis’ impact (see Fioretos 2011; Payne 2014)

Source: Inspired by Mahoney and Thelen (2010: 15–16); see also Thelen (2003) and Streeck and Thelen (2005).

Discursive Institutionalism Vivien Schmidt developed a fourth institutionalism – discursive institutionalism. This focuses on the importance of ideas and discourse. Schmidt (2008, 2010) is concerned with explaining institutional change by highlighting the role of ideas, having argued that this is inadequately covered by other versions of NI. However, scholars who have adopted institutionalism in their work, such as Peters (1999) and Sikkink (1991), had previously acknowledged the importance of ideas for NI. For Schmidt, however, discourse is ‘the exchange of ideas’ (Schmidt 2010: 15) or the ‘interactive process of conveying ideas’ (Schmidt 2008: 303), encompassing ‘not only the substantive content of ideas but also the interactive processes by which ideas are conveyed’ (Schmidt 2008: 305). On the subject of change, discursive institutionalism sees change as dynamic and possible. Yet recent explanations for institutional change within sociological institutionalism suggest an increasing overlap with discursive institutionalism. Change may be viewed as endogenous and constructed through ‘reframing, recasting collective memories and narratives through epistemic communities, advocacy coalitions, communicative action, deliberative democracy’ (Schmidt 2010: 5). Schmidt, nevertheless, maintains a distinction between sociological and discursive institutionalism. While sociological institutionalism is concerned with culture (social values that legitimate institutions), discursive institutionalism is concerned with ideas (the substantive content of policies, programmes and philosophies) and discourse (the interactive process of conveying ideas).

Feminist Institutionalism Since the early 2000s, feminists have taken particular interests in theorizing institutions. Scholars such as Waylen (2009) started their engagement by revisiting historical institutionalism through a feminist lens. The core motivation of feminists interested in institutions has been to reveal the

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gendered character of institutions. By this, we mean that gender is built into the rules of the game, and this impacts on the behaviour of men and women as regards specific policies (Chappell 2010). The feminist interest in institutions has resulted in a distinct plank of institutionalism known as feminist institutionalism. This is normatively motivated by a desire for institutional transformation and transformative policy outcomes. Gender is the ‘socially constructed and culturally variable differences between women and men and … a … way of signifying (and naturalising) relationships of power and hierarchy’ (Haastrup and Kenny 2016: 201). In the early days of this emergent approach, scholars such as Georgina Waylen sought to integrate a feminist lens into existing institutionalisms rather than creating a new one. Waylen (2009) argued that historical institutionalism, for its pluralism, was more amenable to incorporating gender into its analysis of institutional change. Others, such as Freidenvall and Krook (2011), show the utility of discursive institutionalism for understanding quota reform in gendered institutions. Kulawik (2009), in her articulation of feminist discursive institutionalism, argues for a feminist modification that serves as a critique to both historical institutionalism and discursive institutionalism. In this iteration, feminist discursive institutionalism redefines institutions as ‘constituted by [gendered] discursive struggles’ (Kulawik 2009: 268) rather than a normative logic of appropriateness about gender. The move from feminist applications to the development of a feminist institutionalism has only occurred in the last decade, driven by the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network and scholars such as Meryl Kenny (2013), Vivien Lowndes (2020), Mona Lena Krook and Fiona Mackay (2011). Feminist institutionalism contributes to NI theorizing by paying particular attention to the interaction of formal and informal institutions. Formal institutions are reflected in the formalized rules of the institutions, while the informal institution is more consistent with so-called rules-in-use (the do’s and don’ts that actors learn on the ground) (Chappell et al. 2010: 576). While the link between the formal and the informal are usually invoked in other NI approaches, feminist institutionalism has shown that it is in this informal space that change can occur as it serves as space for contestation and resistance. By excavating the gendered logics that often occur in informal contexts, but which interact and uphold formal institutions, change that challenges patriarchy and inequities can be sought within an institution. Having described the genealogy of institutionalist research, and how institutions are conceived in international relations from the perspective of a variety of institutionalist approaches, we now turn to examining the research that has been generated from these approaches.

The Uses of Institutionalisms In their in-depth study of international relations and institutionalism, March and Olsen (1998) justify their approach thus: An institutional approach is one that emphasizes the role of institutions and institutionalization in the understanding of human actions within an organization, social order, or society. Such definitions are … broad enough to encompass things as varied as collections of contracts, legal rules, social norms, and moral precepts. To narrow the range somewhat, we define [our] perspective in terms of two grand issues that divide students of the dynamics of social and political action and structures. (March and Olsen 1998: 948–949)

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And herein lies the utility of institutional approaches. Functionalism and neo-functionalism have been developed with respect to regional integration in Europe and the evolution of the EU first as the European Economic Community to European Community to its form today. Although neo-functionalism went out of fashion in the later 1970s, it has seen a resurgence in the works of scholars such as Arne Niemann and his co-authors. To use one example, in a co-authored article with Johana Speyer, Niemann applies neo-functionalism to explain the EU’s management of migration. Niemann and Speyer examine the 2015 creation of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (EBCG). It was created to deal with the so-called migration crisis via the Mediterranean across EU borders. While the EU was the key stakeholder, this was considered a crisis of global governance to which the EU needed a response, hence the EBCG. By applying neo-­functionalism to this EU response, Niemann and Speyer showed that the weakness of the existing mechanism, Frontex, was exposed by the crisis, which, in addition to a stronger supranational EU, allowed for the creation of the EBCG, which had not been possible fifteen years previously when it had been initially proposed. In effect, the EBCG was indicative of a functional change supported by previous integration and response to a particular crisis. Similarly, Bergmann shows how functional discrepancies and spillover pressures within the EU’s security architecture helped to achieve new security policy competencies in an area that the EU had struggled to gain further integration (Bergmann 2019). The application of neo-functionalism in these examples overlaps with Thelen and Mahoney’s ideas of incremental change as conceived within NI. Fioretos (2017) argues that NI contributes to larger debates in IR by challenging the idea that institutions only reflect the distributions of power or the aggregation of their preferences. Rather, institutionalists show how ‘rules and conventions could transform international politics’ so that it is less antagonistic than is portrayed by realists (Fioretos 2017: 8). March and Olsen (1998: 951) explain foreign policy practice as applying the association of rules with particular identities to particular situations, drawing on the logic of appropriateness. It is also possible, however, to draw on the logic of consequences, and therefore explain foreign policy as an outcome of an international system that is based on ‘interacting autonomous, egoistic, self-interested maximizers’ (1998: 952). NI has resonated among International Relations scholars who study the EU. Specifically, it has been used to challenge the functionalist assumptions about spillovers, suggesting instead that decision-­ making rules within the EU can hinder further integration (see Aspinwall and Schneider 2000). NI has particularly resonated among scholars researching migration governance and border management in the EU context. Helena Ekelund (2014) traces the establishment of Frontex to explain how initial institutional choices impacted on eventual policy outcomes. She finds that the three main institutionalisms all contribute an explanation to changes in the border management regime over time, but underscores the importance of history and social contexts for understanding institutional emergence – and consequently challenging the dominant rational-choice explanations of EU practices in international politics. At the height of the institutionalist turn in the 1990s, however, rational-choice institutionalism was the more popular approach. This contends that institutions do not influence actors’ preferences; rather, they provide particular contexts within which actors can maximize their interests. By effectively calculating the best approaches to fulfil their interests’ political actors invest in developing institutions as a means of reducing transaction costs. These are the ‘costs of specifying and enforcing the contracts that underlie exchange’ (North 1984: 7). In International Relations, transaction costs may be

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Box 11.1 An Institutionalist Account of Crisis: The EU and Migration The use of NI as a theoretical approach has been well embedded within EU studies and in particular within studies on European integration. Migration at EU level is both an external and internal policy concern. The so-called European migration or refugee crisis is illustrative of how exogenous shocks or external conditions can drive institutional and policy changes. Migration is also a particularly salient policy as it connects the domestic and international policy realms. The crisis of 2015, which is characterized by the increased numbers of asylum seekers coming to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea, produced a critical juncture within the EU in that it impacted on institutional and new policy arrangement. In consideration of this critical juncture, an institutionalist account can source ‘why’ actors behave in specific ways within institutional constraints if taking a rational-choice perspective. Sociological institutionalism would engage with the contestations of ideas that are laid bare by the crisis despite shared values, norms and commitments over time. Finally, a feminist institutionalist account would focus on the functioning of informal institutions alongside the formal one and the reproduction of gendered hierarchies by EU actors in the governance of migration/ asylum policies (Haastrup and Kenny 2016). Whereas studies taking integration approaches such as liberal intergovernmentalism focused on the role of the member states in blocking actions such as the refugee quota (Zaun 2018), a new institutionalist account considers, for instance, the implications of institutional design for the governance migration and asylum policy. Ripoll Servent (2018) in her analysis of the Common European Asylum System, shows how the process by which the EU developed new competencies (adding new rules to the institution) created tensions within the system (actors at EU level and among different

groups of member states). Yet these tensions were exacerbated by the exogenous shock of the crisis. The combination of this invariably led to the reconstitution of Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders, as the EBCG. While the basic architecture of Frontex remained the same, the new agency signalled a change in mandate. Prior to the 2015 crisis, Frontex was reliant on member states for resources and staff, and without explicit authorization was unable to conduct search and rescue operations and deficiency highlighted by the crisis. Post-2015, drawing on existing provisions in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the new agency gained the power to collaborate with member states’ authorities responsible for border management alongside its existing competencies. While the new agency intends to support members by coordinating the border management of Europe’s external borders, and ostensibly to prevent death at sea, it also brought about some unintended consequences. Stachowitsch and Sachseder (2019) show how the risk-based approach taken by the EBCG as part of its transformation has resulted in an institution that constructs migrants, including asylum seekers, as security threats, even when simultaneously taking on the role of a highly masculinized protector of this group of immigrants. Consequently, the state of play undermines the EU’s image as a human rights actor (p. 117). Overall, institutionalist analyses suggest that changes within the migration and asylum system have had significant policy outcomes. With the crisis, the dual competencies of community law and intergovernmental decision-making came to a head, preventing effective responses to immigration management, particularly regarding multiple deaths at sea.

articulated within international agreements or treaties that provide stability for state to state relations and guide actors’ behaviours. Actors enter into them if they believe that within a particular policy context their interests are fulfilled, and the costs go up for the belligerent if the agreement is broken. In the 1980s, rational-choice institutionalists such as Fritz W Scharpf, George Tsebelis and Garrett tried to explain how the EU worked. As Mark Pollock notes, their work frame EU institutions as the outcomes of member state choices and as entities shaped by policymaking and policy outcomes (Pollack 2007: 36). In utilizing rational-choice institutions, some of the work focus on the EU’s international relations by arguing that member states allow the European Commission certain competencies. By allowing the Commission to negotiate international agreements, states can reduce transaction

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costs of policymaking, since the Commission is able to monitor the extent of compliance at member state level (Pollack 2007: 39; see also Pollack 2003). Sociological institutionalism’s contribution of the logic of appropriateness has helped to explore informal practices within international institutions. Risse (1999) has argued that research conducted in the sociological institutionalist tradition has contributed to the work on the diffusion of EU institutional norms to the domestic level, as well as within international politics to shape actor behaviours. Jane Jenson and Frédéric Mérand (2010) challenge the narrowness of rational-choice institutionalism in explaining the EU. Jenson and Mérand advocate for a sociological view of institutionalism as a means through which to draw out the importance of ‘informal practices, symbolic representations and power relations of social actors’ (Jenson and Mérand 2010: 74). Such an approach goes beyond the formal institutions or actors as utility maximizers. As Nylander demonstrates in his analysis of interest group inclusion into decision-making processes within the EU, a sociological approach allows for a deeper analysis of the patterns of interaction. Interest groups have access to decision-making processes not simply because the formal decision-making process allows it or because the material capabilities of interest groups can ‘buy’ such access; rather, he shows that interactions between these groups and EU actors allow for the reframing of preferences that conform in the end to the social values of EU institutions. This case underscores that by taking the sociological approach, an analysis of the EU polity can give attention to the ways in which mundane practices of interaction become instilled within the institutions and shape actors’ behaviours in international politics. While March and Olsen established a good basis for considering institutionalist framings in IR, there has been other explicit use of the newer variants of NI applied to sites of International Relations. For example, Katharine Wright (2016) seeks to theorize a feminist approach to international security institutions by applying feminist institutionalism to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Her analysis shows the evolution of NATO’s role as an unlikely gender actor through its attempts to implement the global normative framework the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Similarly, Jennifer Thomson (2019) shows how feminist institutionalism can serve to understand post-conflict institutional design. Ansorg and Haastrup (2018) for their part apply feminist institutionalism to the foreign policy practices of the EU by investigating the gendered nature of security institutions and the design and implementation of security sector reform programmes. Research on the international regimes on migration (see Box 11.1), climate politics (see Chapter 12) and trade have lent themselves well to being analysed via institutionalist approaches, as they often require collective action and yet they are not completely ceded to international institutions. It is within this interstice of states, institutions, epistemic communities and other non-state actors that international regulatory frameworks or regimes emerge (Horvath et al. 2017). In 2000, James Hollifield (2000) sought to explain the relationship between the policies and economics of regulating migration within the European Community by applying regime theory. This analysis offers a different take on institutional emergence and incremental change to Niemann’s neo-­ functionalist approach. Hollifield placed changes in Europe, that is, the emergence of an international migration regime among EU member states, within a broader international frame. This allowed for comparison between Europe and North America (variation within and among regimes). Regime theory as an institutionalist approach allowed Hollifield to explore the increasing interdependence of policies and policy outcomes of European states on migration as well as the interaction between internal and external dimensions of migration policies.

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Critiques and Overlaps This chapter has so far described institutionalist approaches and articulated its uses in international politics, drawing in particular on examples from the EU. Yet institutionalist approaches are not without their critique. The initial approaches, functionalism and neo-functionalism, fell out of favour within European integration studies and therefore international politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Chief among the criticisms was the assumption of automatic integration that did not account for member states and the impact of the international political environment within which the EU existed. The most fervent critique of this institutionalist approach came from intergovernmentalism, in the form of Andrew Moravcsik’s liberal intergovernmentalism. In The Choice for Europe (1998), Moravscsik outlines his grand theory to explain the EU as an institution. The EU, it is argued, is the combination of bargaining between national leaders and uploading national preferences based on specific geopolitical interests. Moracvscik’s theorizing was influenced by Robert Putnam’s two-­ level games, which articulated international politics as the interaction between politics in the domestic and the international spheres. Liberal intergovernmentalism was and remains possibly the most widely used theory of European integration. It draws equally on IR theories of realism and neo-liberalism (Rosamond 2000). According to Moravscik, the EU is an intergovernmental regime with the expressed purpose of managing economic interdependence, which is based on the outcome of national bargaining. States are the most important actors in the EU regime, and the powers of a state matter to the extent to which its preferences matter in the intergovernmental setting. In a way, liberal intergovernmentalism shares much with rational-choice institutionalism and regime theory. It is critical of neo-functionalism and historical institutionalism, however. In addition to questioning functional spillover, Moravscik (2018) conceives of historical institutionalism’s place in EU studies as an extension of neo-functionalism, though concedes that they examine different things (Moravscik 2018: 1665–1666). However, liberal intergovernmentalism has also been critiqued for its overt focus on the grand moment of (potential) change in the EU context. It does not account for gradual change that could result as an outcome of mundane practices or be initiated at supranational level, given the position of state decision-makers. The various new institutionalist approaches serve as critiques of each other depending on what they emphasize (see Table 11.1). For example, historical and sociological institutionalism critique rational-choice institutionalism for its narrowness and overt emphasis on actors as utility maximizers. Meanwhile, historical institutionalism critiques sociological institutionalism for the overdetermined role given to the institutions for the actions of political actors. Perhaps most important, though, is the tendency for NI to continue focusing on formal institutions despite accounting for informality within sociological, historical and feminist institutionalisms. Arguably, the international system itself can be conceptualized as an institution. This has long been the position of the English School. This is a sociological theory that identifies institutions of international society that exist outside the boundaries of organizations or formal structure. In this sense, there is an overlap between the English School and regime theory. Regime theory, in focusing on regimes rather than just structure, would, for example, focus on regimes of economic relations (IMF, World Bank, WTO), security governance (United Nations, the AU) or climate relations (Kyoto Protocol, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). According to Stivachtis, within the English School, ‘institutions refer to long-term practices among states (such

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as diplomacy, law and war) rather than to international bureaucratic structures (organisations) that may be established to facilitate state interaction’ (2018: 1). Institutions, though unconfined by bureaucratic structures, are nevertheless prescriptive. Hedley Bull (1977) identifies five primary institutions of international (inter-state) society: diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, war and the role of great powers. These institutions are governed by rules and norms and share much in terms of the institutionalist approaches considered here. Yet, arguably, unlike the approaches that seek to understand change and institutional emergence, the English School can deal with change but not how institutions emerge or disappear. Importantly, the extent to which such an approach to institutions can truly be universal is worth questioning given the focus on ‘balance of power’ and the role of great powers: Buzan argues that this conception is firmly within a ‘Westphalian straitjacket’ (Buzan 2004: 169). Undoubtedly, the English School provides scope for unpacking the dominant international (Western) ‘order’ and thinking about institutions beyond structures.

Conclusion This chapter has tried to provide a broad overview of institutionalist approaches to international relations. Starting with functionalism and neo-functionalism, which are often limited to European integration in their use, it takes a broader view to explain regime theory and the various permutations of NI. In addition to describing how institutions are understood within these institutionalisms as well as the main exponents, the second section of the chapter focuses on the uses of these institutionalist approaches. This is by no means exhaustive, rather hinting at the ways in which international relations inquiries have benefited from institutionalist analyses. As this chapter illustrates, institutionalisms allow the scholar to seek understanding and explanations about the interaction of individuals or group of individuals (agents/actors) and institutions, and also how institutions emerge and exist within and outside organizations. Despite the variations in emphasis, there is a significant overlapping understanding of what constitutes an institution, drawing together the different approaches discussed here. Indeed, the diversity of institutionalisms has brought an advantageous richness, rather than hindrance, to the discipline. Among the diversity of institutionalisms there are many overlaps. Change is a common thread among those who employ institutionalist approaches. Whether and how change occurs especially preoccupies the four traditions of NI theory. While rational-choice and historical and sociological institutionalism tend to emphasize institutional stability, discursive institutionalism emphasizes the possibilities of change through discourse and ideas. Recent shifts in historical institutionalism have challenged the notion that change is only possible when there is extreme disruption (see Mahoney and Thelen 2010; Table 11.2), and within sociological institutionalism new room is being made for the possibilities of internal changes to institutions. Another overlapping thread within institutionalisms is the nature of institutions – formal and informal. While most applications of neo-functionalism and NI within International Relations end up evaluating formal structures and tracing the formal institution through documents, interviewing experts who uphold the institutional position, feminist institutionalism has called for more attention to the informal. In so doing, attention is paid to the work that actors within an institution do that is not formally codified but is relied on to make the institution work. The utility of NI is clear particularly in evaluating foreign policy practices that link the domestic and the

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international. NI shows that institutions are constituted by more than just physical structures. Regime theory, though, also concerned with formal structures, sees institutions as existing beyond these. The regime as institutions allows for the consideration of different actors and informal practices, even as these are evaluated sometimes within formal structures. In the third section, the chapter briefly highlights some of the main critiques to institutionalisms, both internal and external. Liberal intergovernmentalism has been used as a critique of both neo-functionalism and historical institutionalism. At the same time, this section considers the overlaps between the institutionalisms and the English School’s notion of institutions. Overall, institutionalisms are important to political outcomes that are dependent on consideration of norms, discourse, history and gendered hierarchies, among other subjects. Institutionalisms can help us answer questions in international politics framed around the five core questions, and in that way provide for a robust analysis of how policy outcomes come to be.

Glossary of Terms Incremental change: Change that, contrary to common explanations, occurs gradually and from within institutions, and not necessarily as a result of external shocks.

Positive feedback: Institutional mechanisms that are self-reinforcing and allow institutions to follow the same processes over and over again even when those processes are no longer efficient.

Unintended consequences: The outcomes of purposeful actions that are unexpected or unforeseen.

Further Reading Hodgson, G.M. (2006) ‘What Are Institutions?’, Journal of Economic Issues 40(1):1–25. Lowndes, V. and Roberts, M. (2013) Why Institutions Matter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). March, J. and Olsen, J. (1998) ‘The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders’, International Organization 52(4): 943–969. Koga, K. (2017) Reinventing Regional Security Institutions in Asia and Africa (London: Routledge). Kenny, M. (2013) Gender and Political Recruitment: Theorizing Institutional Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lowndes, V. (2020). How Are Political Institutions Gendered? Political Studies 68(3): 543–564. Navari, C. (1996) Functionalism Versus Federalism: Alternative Visions of European Unity in Philomena Murray and Paul Rich eds. Visions of European Unity Routledge. Haas, E. (1961). International Integration: The European and the Universal Process. International Organization 15(3): 366–392. Haas, E. (1967), The Uniting Of Europe And The Uniting Of Latin America. Jcms: Journal of Common Market Studies 5 (4): 315–343. Haas, E. (1970), The Study of Regional Integration: Reflections on the Joy and Anguish of Pretheorizing, International Organization 24 (4): p. 606–646. Haas, E., & Schmitter, P. (1964). Economics and Differential Patterns of Political Integration: Projections About Unity in Latin America. International Organization, 18(4): 705–73

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Young, Oran, R. (1980). International Regimes: Problems of Concept Formation. World Politics, (32)3: pp. 331–356. Kratochwil, Friedrich V. and Ruggie, John G. (1986). “International Organization: A State of the Art on the Art of the State.” International Organization 40(4) pp. 753–775. Strange, S. (1982). Looking Back–But Mostly Forward. Millennium, 11(1), 38–49. March, J., & Olsen, J. (1984). The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life. The American Political Science Review, 78(3), 734-749. doi:10.2307/1961840 Cairney P (2012) Understanding Public Policy: Theories and Issues. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Freidenvall L., Krook M.L. (2011) Discursive Strategies for Institutional Reform: Gender Quotas in Sweden and France. In: Krook M.L., Mackay F. (eds) Gender, Politics and Institutions. Gender and Politics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230303911_3 Peters, B. Guy. 1996. ”Political Institutions Old and New.” In: Robert E. Goodin and Hans Dieter Klingemann (eds.): A New Handbook of Political Science. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 205–222 Moon, D. S. (2013). ‘Tissue on the Bones’: Towards the Development of a Post-structuralist Institutionalism. Politics, 33(2), 112–123. Larsson, Oscar (2018) Advancing Post-Structural Institutionalism: Discourses, Subjects, Power Asymmetries, and Institutional Change, Critical Review, 30,3-4, p. 325–346 Mahoney, J and Thelen, K (2010) eds Explaining institutional change: ambiguity, agency and power, Cambridge University Press. Ripoll Servent, A. (2018) A New Form of Delegation in EU Asylum: Agencies as Proxies of Strong Regulators. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 56 (1) 83–100 Ekelund Helena (2014) “The Establishment of FRONTEX: A New Institutionalist Approach”, Journal of European Integration, 36(2) pp. 99–116 Jenson, J. & Mérand, F. (2010). Sociology, institutionalism and the European Union. Comparative European Politics 8, 74–92 2000 “Migration and the ‘New’ International Order: The Missing Regime.” In Managing Migration: Time for a New International Regime. Ed. B. Ghosh. Oxford: Oxford Rosamond, B. (2000). Theories of European Union Integration. Macmillan: Basingstoke Moravcsik, A. (2018) Preferences, Power and Institutions in 21st-century Europe. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 56 (7) 1648– 674. Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics London: Macmillan

GREEN THEORY MATTHEW PATERSON

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The past forty years of global politics have been punctuated by cycles of concern about the sustainability of the trajectory of human societies, cycles that have been provoked by particular environmental scares but have frequently been articulated as presaging a more systemic crisis. We moved thus from concerns about pesticides in the early 1960s to those about ‘limits to growth’ and the ‘population bomb’ by the early 1970s. In a later cycle in the 1980s, we moved from regional concerns about acid rain or nuclear fallout to ‘global’ concerns such as ozone depletion, deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change. In the present cycle, climate change has again loomed large. Indeed, it has become increasingly clear that climate change on the one hand threatens the very existence of human civilizations because of impacts such as sea-level rise, extreme weather events, collapse of food systems and rapid expansion of diseases, and on the other hand requires radical transformations of the entire infrastructure of modern life, which needs to be weaned off the fossil fuels that currently power virtually everything we do (Paterson 2021). We have also recently seen what at least appears to be a significant reframing of the problem, through the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. In each cycle of concern, the place of environmental questions on the global political agenda gets progressively higher: the largest diplomatic events in history regarding any issue on the global agenda are the annual conferences of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But perhaps more important, with each cycle of concern, the systemic character of the crisis becomes more apparent, and the implications for the way that global politics is organized become more evident. Despite, or perhaps because of, this annual extraordinary diplomatic attention to climate change, there have been persistent problems in negotiating adequate treaties to address climate change, from the original UNFCCC in 1992, through the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 to the Paris Agreement of 2015. These problems have reinforced the sense of the depth of the crisis that climate change poses and the apparent inability of existing political structures to respond adequately (Dubash and Rajamani 2010; Spash 2016). The latest wave of concern has, perhaps as a logical consequence, triggered an upsurge in radical activism, most prominently with Greta Thunberg and the school strikes for climate she inspired, as well as Extinction Rebellion, arguing increasingly for ‘system change not climate change’, while being prepared to engage in highly disruptive social movement action (e.g. Doherty et al. 2018). They have often also promoted institutional innovation such as those favoured by Green theorists, notably with the proposals for deliberative citizens’ assemblies at the heart of Extinction Rebellion demands. This wave of activism appears to have contributed to accelerated action from at least some political authorities, including the establishment of citizens’ climate assemblies (Willis 2020). At the same time, however, even partial responses to the ecological crisis can generate their own problems. The rapid emergence of crises over food prices and scarcity provoked in part by the

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pursuit of biofuels, themselves ostensibly promoted as a response to climate change, suggest the complex and systemic character of the global socio-ecological crisis (e.g. Clapp 2009). While this often calls attention to the contradictions between the organization of global politics and the ecological predicament societies face, there are also glimmers of changes in political practice and perhaps even structure, which may prefigure more substantial transformations. Theorists have approached the political character of the ecological crisis in a variety of ways. Not all accept that such a crisis may produce profound systemic change; indeed, not all accept that an overall ‘crisis’ even exists. But the raison d’être of this chapter is that such radical accounts – which I will group under the heading ‘Green theory’ – deserve to be taken seriously, and thus the potential for ecological crises to reshape global politics should be thought through. As one strand of ecological IR theory now suggests (Eckersley 2004), as much as engaging in normative theory as to how global politics ought to be reshaped to meet the goal of sustainability, the challenge is to understand political transformations that are already under way. It should also be understood that the ambition of Green theory goes way beyond the narrow understanding of ‘environmental issues’. The classic questions of International Relations – the search for peace, the operations of power politics, the question of global governance, normative questions such as global justice – all undergo a thorough rethinking in the light of the ecological challenge. Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne (2005) provide us with a useful way to understand the range of theoretical approaches to global ecological politics. They distinguish between four principal variants of thought: free-market environmentalism, institutionalism, bio-environmentalism and social ecology. I will say little about free-market environmentalism, not because it is not important in the field of environmental ideology (indeed its practitioners dominate much of environmental political practice), but rather because its proponents have nothing to say specifically about IR. The key debate then is between institutionalists, who tend to eschew discussion of any broad ‘environmental crisis’ and focus on how international institutions deal with specific issue areas, and bio-­ environmentalists and social Greens, who insist on such a crisis and the need for political transformation to deal with it effectively. The former provide the bulk of the literature within IR on environmental questions  – if you read articles on the environment in journals such as International Organization, or even the main journal in the field Global Environmental Politics, a solid majority will be written from an institutionalist perspective. This chapter starts with a brief discussion of institutionalist approaches to global environmental politics before moving on to what I argue are two variants of a properly Green approach to global politics that arise out of the bio-­ environmentalist and social green arguments (for more details, see in particular Newell 2019). Regarding other International Relations traditions, Green politics shares various features with other critical approaches. First, it shares the rejection of a hard and fast fact/value distinction with feminism, critical theory and post-structuralism, by making clear attempts to integrate normative and explanatory concerns. Its conception of theory is clearly incompatible with positivist conceptions that have such a clear distinction. Second, it shares an interest in resisting the concentration of power, the homogenizing forces in contemporary world politics and the preservation of difference and diversity with post-structuralism, post-colonialism and feminism. Third, it shares a critique of the states system with critical theory and others, although it adopts a position that rejects the idea of global power structures emerging in correspondence with some idea of a ‘global community’ in favour of decentralizing power away from nation-states to more local levels. While for critical theorists such as Linklater (1998) the idea of community at the global level is about

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balancing unity and diversity rather than one that wishes to create a homogeneous global identity, Greens tend to argue that community only makes sense at the very local level – the idea of a ‘global community’ is for Greens nonsensical, if not potentially totalitarian (Esteva and Prakash 1997). Nevertheless, there is a shared sense that the purpose of theory is to promote emancipation (Laferriere 1996; Laferriere and Stoett 1999, 2006). Allied to this normative rejection of the states system is a rejection of a clear empirical split between domestic and international politics, shared in particular with pluralists such as John Burton, but also with Marxists, critical theorists and feminists. Greens would not believe it useful therefore to think in terms of ‘levels of analysis’, a form of thinking still prevalent in realism, as it arbitrarily divides up arenas of political action that are fundamentally interconnected. The emergence of various multilevel or transnational environmental governance projects in recent years (discussed in due course) could be seen by Greens as vindication of this logic  – that the states system is too locked up in the pursuit of security, economic growth and competitive relations with each other, and novel arrangements enable us to deal more adequately with the spatial and political characteristics of the global ecological crisis. Finally, there is a clear focus on political economy, and the structural inequality inherent in modern capitalist economies also focused on by Marxists and dependency theorists. However, in contrast to post-structuralism, it shares to an extent an element of modernist theorizing, in the sense that Greens are clearly trying to understand the world in order to make it possible to improve it. For Hovden (2006) or Weber (2006), this makes it more compatible with Frankfurt School-type critical theory and feminism than with post-structuralism, as these both have a clear emancipatory normative goal, and in particular a clearer sense that their explanations or interpretations of the world are connected to a clear political project. This is linked to post-­ structuralism’s rejection of foundationalism, which marks a clear difference from Green politics that necessarily relies on fairly strong foundational claims, of both the epistemological and ethical variety. However, this argument should not be pushed too far, as there are also tensions with the way in which critical theory tries to reconstruct Enlightenment rationality. Eckersley, for example (1992: ch. 5), makes much of attempts by Habermas in particular (she contrasts Habermas to Marcuse) to reclaim science for radical political purposes, suggesting that it necessarily ends up justifying human domination of nature. I would ultimately concur with Mantle (1999), who argues that the closest connections that Green theory has to other approaches in International Relations are to feminist approaches. Despite these connections, Green theory has its own distinctive perspective. The focus on humanity–nature relations and the adoption of an ecocentric ethic with regard to those relations, the focus on limits to growth, the particular perspective on the destructive side of development and the focus on decentralization away from the nation-state are all unique to Green politics.

T heorizing Environment Within International Relations From the earliest accounts of the global political character of environmental problems, they have been understood on the one hand as problems of collective action, and on the other hand through lenses of ‘security’. Perhaps the founding metaphor for both of these is that of Garrett Hardin’s

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‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (1968). This suggests that the structural incentives of actors (states) operating in relation to open access resources (Hardin’s misnamed commons) both lead to the over-use and abuse of those resources, and impede collective efforts to mitigate such abuse. The actors themselves in the situation he describes come to view both the environmental problem itself (land degradation) and the actions of the other actors as a threat to the security of their livelihood. On the basis of this assumption, as well as out of more obviously problematic and ultimately racist accounts of a ‘population bomb’ (Ehrlich 1968; and as Mildenberger 2019 points out, Hardin’s own arguments were underpinned by his racism), a whole industry has emerged focusing on ‘environmental security’, which examines how, for example, resource shortages (water, oil), soil erosion or climate change generate inter-state conflict either directly or indirectly (e.g. Myers 1993; Deudney and Matthew 1999; Homer-Dixon 1999). Much of this literature is clearly realist in inspiration; there are no specific ecological-theoretical insights to be developed about global politics. Some (notably Dalby 2002) do develop specific claims from a notion of ecological (as opposed to environmental) security that contribute to a rethinking of global politics from an ecological point of view, points I will elaborate later. Hardin’s argument proceeds from an ideal type of a village common, where villagers have the right to graze cows. The land can only support a fixed number of cows, but each herder has an incentive to graze more than their share on the land. They gain the income from the extra cow, while the damage is shared by all the herders. Hardin’s motivation is to show that there is no technological solution to this problem: indeed, new technologies may simply accelerate the rate of destruction. Rather, the problem is structural, rooted in the authority structure over the land that permits open access to all, and in the incentives herders therefore face which lead to them over-use resources and degrade the common.

Institutionalist Accounts of Environmental Politics Hardin’s conclusion, and that of some following his logic, is that the tragedy is insurmountable without an overarching change in the authority structure. William Ophuls (1977) elaborated this logic most fully in relation to IR, arguing explicitly for a world state with sufficient power to impose ecological restraint on actors across the world. Hardin’s claim is actually significantly milder. Having argued that ‘freedom in a commons brings ruin to all’ (Hardin 1968: 1244), his other catchphrase is the call for ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’ (Hardin 1968: 1247). While much has been made of his term ‘coercion’, leading to him being called ‘eco-authoritarian’, the logic of his claim is also shared by the liberal institutionalist school in IR and the way it analyses international environmental politics. For broader analyses of institutionalist perspectives, see Chapter 11; I limit myself to the specifically environmental arguments here. Hardin’s logic mirrors much analysis of what are more often called ‘collective action problems’ across the social sciences: situations where actors recognize the necessity of acting in concert with others in the pursuit of specific goals, but where such collaboration may not be easy to achieve. Ecological problems can be seen as paradigmatic of such collective action problems. Hardin’s tragedy of the commons is similar to a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. In that game, where (classically) two prisoners are held by the police and offered more lenient sentences in return for information that will lead to the conviction of their colleague for a more serious crime, the best outcome is that both keep quiet (cooperate), but in fact each is likely to spill the beans (defect). Similarly, the best

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outcome in Hardin’s commons is that all limit themselves to ten cows (cooperate) but the dominant dynamic is that each puts an extra cow on the land (defects), thus degrading the land for all. Institutionalists suggest overall that the possibilities of cooperation are significantly greater than that allowed by Hardin (or in IR by realists) and that international organizations and institutions may therefore play a significant role in fostering cooperation (see Young 1994). The concept of an international regime (Chapter 11) is the central concept here. Environmental debates have been important in shaping one particular debate in regime theory, the attempt to explain the effectiveness of regimes (e.g. Bernauer 1995; Victor et al. 1998; Young 1999; Mitchell 2006). Haas (1990, 1992) and Haas et al. (1993) outline three sorts of key elements to explain regime effectiveness, what they call the three Cs – concern, the contractual environment and capacity. That is, international institutions can contribute to the articulation of concern about particular problems and an understanding of their implications, they can reduce transaction costs and help identify possible sites of inter-state agreement, and they can help states build their capacity to respond to environmental challenges, for example through the building of monitoring capacity. It is worth emphasizing that analysts often withdraw to a fairly limited account of regime effectiveness – for example, along the lines of ‘Does the institution affect state behaviour?’ or ‘Are emissions lower than they would have been without the institution?’ Asking the question ‘Have they contributed to a reversal of unsustainable trends?’ would lead to a rather pessimistic assessment. Only in the ozone depletion case is a clear reversal of trends identifiable, with some more modest claims that could be made in the case of sulphur emissions and perhaps one or two other cases. As Princen eloquently establishes (2003, 2005), we have witnessed since the early 1970s an extraordinary process of cooperation and institution-building, and at the same time a significant increase in environmental degradation. Returning to the starting metaphor, one could use this to suggest that Hardin’s original logic was correct, that this is indeed a tragedy (in the sense of a remorseless logic unfolding with disastrous consequences). Alternatively, one could conclude that the problem has been mis-specified – that in fact the political origins of environmental problems are not caused by the problem of open-access resources, but other, more systemic, dynamics of modern societies. The bio-environmentalists and social Greens outlined in this chapter start with different analyses of the origins of environmental problems. Along with many in IR, institutionalists start with the premise that international politics is to be characterized as a number of sovereign states interacting in an anarchic environment. But to the extent that environmental institution-building becomes ever more complex, shaping state behaviour more and more deeply, increasingly involving a wide range of actors other than states, the utility of the international anarchy metaphor in explaining what happens declines. Institutionalists occasionally acknowledge this problem and usually reject it, insisting that the world is still first and foremost an inter-state world (e.g. Young 1997). But at least the potential for what has become known as ‘global environmental governance’ to create possible post-sovereign politics exists (Paterson 2000: ch. 7).

 eyond IR: Green Politics and the Challenge B to World Order There are a number of limits to institutional analyses of global environmental politics (for a fuller elaboration of these points, see Paterson 2000: ch. 2). The problem of establishing the ecological effectiveness of regimes is one, already alluded to. The limitation of focusing only on the inter-state

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aspect of global politics, to the neglect of various phenomena (multinational corporations, global civil society, globalization, private governance, for example), is another. Most important perhaps is the lack of a sustained account of why environmental degradation occurs in the first place. Sometimes the metaphor of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons is deployed (e.g. Vogler 1992: 118; Young 1994). But whereas these analyses tend to treat the metaphor in terms of obstacles to cooperation, Hardin developed it to explain the origins of environmental degradation. At other times, institutionalists offer a discussion of discrete, secular trends – in population, consumption, technology, individual behaviour (e.g. Choucri 1993; Homer-Dixon 1993). These, however, are treated as ad hoc explanations, and the phenomena are not considered as part of a broad social whole. The two Green perspectives elaborated in this chapter specifically start from a basis of insisting on this structural and social character of environmental degradation. Perhaps most obviously, if all there was to the study of global environmental politics was the institutionalist approach or the notion of environmental security, there would be little novel to say. All of the theoretical propositions entailed in this discussion come from one or another variant of mainstream IR theory – realism, liberalism or constructivism in particular. However, a much more radical tradition exists in Green ideology, out of which a more distinctive Green theory of global politics can be fashioned. Clapp and Dauvergne (2005: 9–15) usefully distinguish between two broad types of radical approach to environmental politics. They label proponents of these two approaches bio-environmentalists and social Greens respectively.

Bio-Environmentalism – Authority, Scale and Ecocentrism Bio-environmentalists tend to focus on the aggregate impact of human activity on the ‘natural’ environment. They couch their arguments in terms of a humanity–nature dualism, and that the objective is to reorganize human societies in order that they live ‘in harmony’ with nature. The approach is often developed in quantitative terms – in terms of increases in resource use, emissions levels, ecosystem tolerance and so on. Key terms such as ‘carrying capacity’ and ‘limits to growth’ have been articulated principally within this framework. Both refer to an idea that the earth has definite biophysical limits in terms of the numbers of people and the level of economic activity that can be supported without undermining the life-support systems that the planet provides. Bio-­ environmentalists suggest that two key trends in human societies – population growth and economic growth, both which are growing exponentially – are in a rapid process of exceeding those limits and pushing us towards a crisis of survival. The classic study The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) argued that the exponential economic and population growth of human societies was producing an interrelated series of crises. Exponential growth was producing a situation in which the world was rapidly running out of resources to feed people or to provide raw material for continued industrial growth (exceeding carrying capacity and productive capacity), and simultaneously exceeding the absorptive capacity of the environment to assimilate the waste products of industrial production (Meadows et al. 1972; Dobson 1990: 15). Meadows et al. (1972) produced their arguments based on computer simulations of the trajectory of industrial societies. They predicted that, at current rates of growth, many raw materials would rapidly run out, pollution would quickly exceed the absorptive capacity of the

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environment and human societies would experience ‘overshoot and collapse’ some time before 2100. Whether the details of their predictions have been accurate has been widely contested. But even if the details were mistaken, it does not follow that their basic logic, that infinite growth in a finite system is impossible, is faulty. Most Greens have taken this principle to be a central plank of their position (e.g. Spretnak and Capra 1985; Trainer 1985; Porritt 1986), and this limits to growth argument has been recently revived and popularized (Jackson 2009; Victor 2019), including through the idea of ‘degrowth’ (D’Alisa et al. 2015). Dobson (1990: 74–80) suggests there are three arguments that are important here. First, technological solutions will not work – they may postpone the crisis but cannot prevent it occurring at some point. Second, the exponential nature of growth means that ‘dangers stored up over a relatively long period of time can very suddenly have a catastrophic effect’ (Dobson 1990: 74). Recent developments in climate change have underscored this point very effectively. Many of its significant impacts, especially those that produced positive feedbacks that make it worse and take it away from potential human control, were thought to be in the medium-term future, but have already arrived: for example, the decline in Arctic sea ice and melting of Greenland’s ice sheets, both of which are occurring much faster than climate scientists and their computer models thought possible (Stroeve et al. 2012). Finally, the problems associated with growth are all interrelated. Simply dealing with them issue by issue will mean that there are important knock-on effects from issue to issue: solving one pollution problem alone may simply change the medium through which pollution is carried, or the scale over which it extends, not reduce pollution overall. The problem of biofuels and food prices mentioned in the introduction to this chapter is a classic example of this. The idea of ‘ecological footprints’ (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) is a more recent version of this type of argument. Many analysts argue on this basis that human societies have already gone beyond the limits of the planet to absorb the impacts of human activity without irreversible damage. For example, the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Report (WWF 2018) argues that we are already in a situation of ‘ecological debt’, using more of the planet’s resources than can be replenished. Politically speaking, the bio-environmentalist approach tends to go in one of three directions. One possibility is that the logic requires highly authoritarian solutions to environmental problems. As noted, Hardin’s logic has an authoritarian reading, and his metaphor was used to generate an argument that centralized global political structures would be needed to force changes in behaviour to reach sustainability (Hardin 1974; Ophuls 1977). In some versions, this involved the adoption of what were called ‘lifeboat ethics’ (Hardin 1974), where ecological scarcity meant that rich countries would have to practise triage on a global scale – to ‘pull up the ladder behind them’. This argument, largely an ecological version of the world government proposals of ‘Idealist’ versions of liberal internationalism (see Chapter 3), has, however, been for the most part rejected by Greens. Others suggest that authoritarianism may be required, but reject the idea that this can be on a global scale. The vision here is for small-scale, tightly knit communities run on hierarchical, conservative lines with self-sufficiency in their use of resources (The Ecologist 1972; Heilbroner 1974). It shares with the above position the idea that it is freedom and egoism that have caused the environmental crisis, and that these tendencies need to be curbed to produce sustainable societies. A second type of political response to environmental degradation from this perspective is one focusing on the question of scale. There is a spatial dimension to the world government proposals,

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but the spatial character of environmental problems does not necessarily lead to proposals for world government or authoritarianism. Some bio-environmentalists tend to argue for a position known as bio-regionalism (e.g. Sale 1980). Here, the argument for ‘living within nature’s limits’ takes the form of suggesting that the spatial character of ecosystems should determine the spatial scale of social, political and economic activity. Particularly important is water, such that watersheds become the key spatial category. But the most common spatial argument by bio-environmentalists is to argue for radical decentralization of power, termed long ago by O’Riordan the ‘anarchist solution’ (1981: 303–307). Most Greens argue that this is the best interpretation of the implications of limits to growth. For many, it is also regarded as a principle of Green politics in its own right (for example, as one of the four principles of Green politics in the widely cited Programme of the German Green Party 1983). The term ‘anarchist’ is used loosely in this typology. It means that Greens envisage global networks of small-scale self-reliant communities. This position would, for example, be associated with people such as Schumacher (1976). It shares the focus on small-scale communities with the previous position, but has two crucial differences. First, relations within communities would be libertarian, egalitarian and participatory, and, as such, arise more out of the logics of social green arguments (discussed later). This reflects a very different set of assumptions about the origins of the environmental crisis: rather than being about the ‘tragedy of the commons’, it is seen to be about the emergence of hierarchical social relations and the channelling of human energies into productivism and consumerism (Bookchin 1982). Participatory societies should provide means for human fulfilment that do not depend on high levels of material consumption. Second, these communities, while self-reliant, are seen to be internationalist in orientation. They are not cut off from other communities, but in many ways are conceived of as embedded in networks of relations of obligations, cultural exchanges and so on. Whether or not one shares such anarchist leanings, the decentralist impulse is nevertheless the most important theme coming out of Green politics for IR. One of the best-known Green political slogans is ‘think globally, act locally’. While obviously fulfilling rhetorical purposes, it also follows from these two principles. It stems from a sense that while global environmental and social/economic problems operate on a global scale, they can be successfully responded to only by breaking down the global power structures that generate them through local action and the construction of smaller-scale political communities and self-reliant economies. One of the best-developed arguments for decentralization within Green theory is given in John Dryzek’s Rational Ecology (1987). Small-scale communities are more reliant on the environmental support services in their immediate locality and therefore more responsive to disruptions in that environment (Dryzek 1987: ch. 16). Self-reliance and smallness shortens feedback channels, so it is easier to respond quickly before disruptions become severe. Dryzek also argues that they are more likely to develop a social ontology that undermines pure instrumental ways of dealing with the rest of nature, commonly identified as a cause of environmental problems (Dryzek 1987: 219; see also The Ecologist 1993). The advocacy of radical decentralization has been widely criticized both within academic debates and by some within Green movements. It is seen as politically ‘unrealistic’, and Green parties have certainly scaled back their commitments to decentralization in response to electoral success and the corresponding need for ‘realism’ (Doherty and de Geus 1994: 4). Beyond this pragmatic concern, the principal criticisms of proposals are threefold (see earlier editions of this

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chapter; and Carter 1999). First, some claim that small-scale anarchistic communities would be too parochial and potentially self-interested to provide atmospheres conducive to cross-community cooperation (e.g. Dobson 1990: 101, 124). Second, decentralized small-scale communities, it is claimed, will have little chance of developing effective mechanisms for resolving global environmental problems (Goodin 1992). While small-scale communities might be able to deal better with local environmental problems, for the reasons Dryzek (1987) outlines, the coordination problems would escalate beyond control with a massive increase in the number of actors at the international level. A third critique is rather different. Rather than arguing that Greens’ attempts to abandon sovereignty and decentralize power means that there is insufficient coordinating capacity, many in fact suggest that Green politics remains committed to a sovereign model of politics (e.g. Kuehls 1996; Wapner 1996; Lipschutz 1997; Dalby 1998). Part of this argument takes us back to the spatial character of ecological problems, which some of these authors (in particular Dalby 1998, 2002) suggest should be understood as about flows and networks, not closed spaces; and part starts from the observation that contemporary global politics is also now organized through flows and networks, thus creating possibilities for political engagement without relying on the metaphor of territorial sovereignty. The third bio-environmentalist account of politics is that the environmental crisis requires a new ethical sensibility to guide political practice. Most refer to this through the notion of ecocentrism; Greens reject anthropocentric ethics (with humans at the centre of the moral world) in favour of an ecocentric approach. For Eckersley (1992), ecocentrism has a number of central features. Empirically, it involves a view of the world as ontologically composed of interrelations rather than individual entities (1992: 49). All beings are fundamentally ‘embedded in ecological relationships’ (1992: 53). Consequently, there are no convincing criteria that can be used to make a hard and fast distinction between humans and non-humans (1992: 49–51). Ethically, therefore, a broad emancipatory project, to which Eckersley allies herself, ought to be extended to non-human nature. Ecocentrism is about ‘emancipation writ large’ (1992: 53). All entities are endowed with a relative autonomy within the ecological relationships in which they are embedded, and therefore humans are not ethically free to dominate the rest of nature. Politically, Eckersley (1992) argues against the decentralist emphasis in much Green thought. On the basis of her reading of the implications of ecocentrism, she develops a political argument from this that is statist in orientation. Although she does not adopt the position of the ‘eco-­ authoritarians’, she argues that the modern state is a necessary political institution from a Green point of view. She suggests that ecocentrism requires that we both decentralize power down within the state, but also centralize power up to the regional and global levels. She argues that a ‘multitiered’ political system, with dispersal of power both down to local communities and up to the regional and global levels is the approach that is most consistent with ecocentrism (Eckersley 1992: 144, 175, 178). This position could be developed within a conventional perspective in International Relations (such as institutionalism, see Chapter 11) to look at the character of a wide variety of inter-state treaties and practices. The most obvious would be those regarding biodiversity, acid rain and climate change. But it could also be developed for global economic institutions such as the World Bank and the military practices of states. Eckersley’s account could also be developed in the context of the literature on ‘global environmental governance’, which implies forms of governance emerging that do not rely solely on

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sovereign states, which I will discuss later in more detail. Eckersley’s position in her (1992) book is a normative claim justifying such shifts in authority. A core problem with this argument is that the interpretation of ecocentrism that underpins Eckersley’s (1992) book is challengeable. Ecocentrism is in itself politically indeterminate. It can range from anarchist to authoritarian, with Eckersley’s version in the middle of the continuum. The predominant alternative interpretation within Green thought suggests that it is the emergence of modern modes of thought that is the problem from an ecocentric point of view. The rationality inherent in modern Western science is an instrumental one, where the domination of the rest of nature, and of women by men, and nature’s use for human instrumental purposes have historically at least been integral to the scientific project on which industrial capitalism is built (e.g. Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993). In other words, environmental ethics are given a historical specificity and material base – the emergence of anthropocentrism is located in the emergence of modernity in all its aspects. Key Concept: Ecocentrism Ecocentrism refers to an ethical approach that refuses to place humans at the centre of the ethical schema, but rather places intrinsic value on ecosystems and all the organisms within them. As

such it is a ‘holistic’ ethical approach rather than an individualist one. It is a key normative underpinning of much Green political thought, although not all Greens define themselves as ecocentric.

This interpretation argues therefore that since modern science is inextricably bound up with other modern institutions such as capitalism, the nation-state and modern forms of patriarchy, it is inappropriate to respond by developing those institutions further, centralizing power through the development of global and regional institutions. Such a response will further entrench instrumental rationality, and this will undermine the possibility for developing an ecocentric ethic. An ecocentric position therefore leads to arguments for scaling down human communities, and in particular for challenging trends towards globalization and homogenization, since it is only by celebrating diversity that it will be possible to create spaces for ecocentric ethics to emerge. More importantly, thinking through this logic suggests that talking about environmental politics as if the character of human societies is more or less irrelevant has severe limits. It is this gap that social Greens fill.

 ocial Greens – Limits to Growth and Political S Economy Clapp and Dauvergne’s (2005) final category is that of social Greens. These tend to agree with bio-environmentalists about the existence of physical limits to growth, particularly economic growth (they at least downplay, and often reject, arguments about population as patriarchal and/ or racist). But they insist that such an observation must be understood in terms of the social systems that generate such growth, and thus of the complex interactions between social and ecological problems. At a general level, social Greens are united in a claim that the power structures – capitalist,

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statist, patriarchal – of contemporary societies, are at the same time highly exploitative, unjust or oppressive and systematically generate environmental crises. In terms specifically of global politics, these arguments can be most clearly seen in those writers who identify global inequalities as key to understanding global (environmental) politics (e.g. Okereke 2008; Parks and Roberts 2010), and also who often suggest that dominant political forces deploy environmental concerns to extend their global control, a process exemplified by Vandana Shiva’s phrase (1993) ‘the greening of global reach’. We can best understand their arguments on the one hand through their critique of the discourse of sustainable development (which shows their distinct take on limits to growth), and on the other hand through their reinterpretation of the notion of the commons (which gives Greens a distinct political economy). There is also, however, an another literature that could be regarded as an extension of key social-ecological insights to global politics – that which deploys theories of complex open systems to global environmental politics, theories that were developed in part in ecological contexts, and can be used to analyse both social and ecological systems, and their interactions, with a view to identifying potential system disruptions and transformations (see in particular Harrison 2006; Hoffmann 2011).

Social Limits to Growth As the notion of sustainable development became fashionable in the 1980s, and as the specific predictions of Meadows et al. concerning resource exhaustion were seen to be inaccurate, belief in limits subsided. But in the 1990s, a politics rejecting economic growth as the primary purpose of governments and societies re-emerged, and has returned more recently in the notion of degrowth. It came, however, less out of the computer modelling methods of Meadows et al. (although her team did produce a twenty-year-on book, Beyond the Limits, Meadows and Randers 1992) than out of emerging critiques of development in the South. Such ‘post-development’ perspectives draw heavily on post-modernism, post-colonialism and feminism (e.g. Shiva 1988; Escobar 1995) and have been used by Greens in the North to develop what might be called a ‘global ecology’ perspective. Through the critique of ‘development’, economic growth again became the subject of critique, although these critics made much closer connections between its ecological and its social consequences (Douthwaite 1992; Wackernagel and Rees 1996; Booth 1998). One reason why the ‘global ecology’ writers object to development is because of limits to growth arguments. Implicit throughout their work is a need to accept the limits imposed by a finite planet, an acceptance ignored by the planet’s managers and mainstream environmentalists (e.g. Sachs 1993). However, their arguments are more subtle than simply reasserting limits to growth arguments. They focus on a number of anti-ecological elements of development. One of the central features of development is the enclosure of commons in order to expand the realm of commodity production and thus of material throughput (The Ecologist 1993). A second is the way such enclosure redistributes and concentrates resources, which has direct ecological consequences and creates a growth-supporting dynamic as growth mitigates the effects of enhanced inequality. A third is the concentrations of power that are involved in enclosure, as smaller numbers of people are able to control the way that land is used, and are often able to insulate themselves from the ecological effects of the way land is used. A fourth is the way such enclosure and the concentrations of power and wealth it effects produce shifts in knowledge relations and systems, typically involving the marginalization of ‘indigenous knowledges’ and the empowerment of ‘experts’ (Appfel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; The Ecologist 1993: 67–70). Finally, such a set of shifts in property systems,

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distribution of resources and power–knowledge relations entrenches the world view that regards the non-human world in purely instrumental terms, thus legitimizing the destructive use of non-­ human nature.

Back to the Commons While adding a socio-ecological critique of growth to the bio-environmentalists’ techno-scientific one, social Greens do something similar for arguments about decentralization of power. On the one hand, for many Greens, much of the decentralist impulse has its origins in a rejection of the state similar to that of anarchists. For example, Spretnak and Capra (1985) suggest that it is the features identified by Max Weber as central to statehood that are the problem from an ecological point of view (1984: 177). Bookchin (1980) gives similar arguments, suggesting that the state is the ultimate hierarchical institution that consolidates all other hierarchical institutions. Carter (1993) outlines a ‘environmentally hazardous dynamic’, where ‘[a] centralized, pseudo-­ representative, quasi-democratic state stabilizes competitive, inegalitarian economic relations that develop “non-convivial”, environmentally damaging “hard” technologies whose productivity supports the (nationalistic and militaristic) coercive forces that empower the state’ (Carter 1993: 45). Thus the state is not only unnecessary from a Green point of view, but also positively undesirable. The decentralist impulse is also expressed in the reappropriation of the notion of the commons. The ‘global ecology’ writers reinforce a political-theoretic argument for decentralization by giving it a political economy. By this I mean they make it so that it is not only a question of the scale of political organization and the authoritarian character of the state, but also a reconceptualization of how economic production, distribution and exchange – the direct way in which human societies transform ‘nature’ – is integrated into political life. Their positive argument is that the most plausibly Green form of political economy is the ‘commons’. This argument is most fully developed by the editors of The Ecologist magazine in their book Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (1993) and by Elinor Ostrom (especially 1990). The argument is essentially that common spaces are sites where the most sustainable practices currently operate. They are under threat from development that continuously tries to enclose them in order to turn them into commodities (the most notable attempt is in efforts to enclose the global carbon cycle via the establishment of carbon markets – see in particular Lohmann 2006). A central part of Green politics is therefore resistance to this enclosure. But it is also a (re)constructive project – creating commons where they do not exist. What are commons? First, they are not the commons as suggested by Hardin, which is rather an ‘open access’ resource (The Ecologist 1993: 13). They are not ‘public’ in the modern sense, which connotes open access under control by the state, while commons are often not open to all, and the rules governing them do not depend on the hierarchy and formality of state institutions. Nor are they ‘private’ – no one person owns and controls the resource. They are rather resources held in common, where the relevant community collectively develops rules governing the use of the resources. This has been a widespread form of resource governance throughout human history, and as The Ecologist (1993) shows, still persists in many places today. Commons, therefore, are not ‘anarchic’ in the sense of having no rules governing them. They are spaces whose use is closely governed, often by informally defined rules and by the communities that depend on them. They depend for their successful operation on a rough equality between the

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members of the community, as imbalances in power would make some able to ignore the rules of the community. They also depend on particular social and cultural norms prevailing – for example, the priority of common safety over accumulation, or distinctions between members and non-­ members (The Ecologist 1993: 9). The key point is that they are typically organized for the production of use values rather than exchange values – that is, they are not geared to commodity production and do not generate pressures for accumulation or growth inherent in capitalist markets. Commons thus enable sustainable practices, for a number of reasons. First, the rough equality in income and power means that none can usurp or dominate the system (The Ecologist 1993: 5). Second, the local scale at which they work means that the patterns of mutual dependence make cooperation easier to achieve. Third, this also means that the culture of recognizing one’s dependence on others, and therefore having obligations, is easily entrenched. Finally, commons make practices based on accumulation difficult to adopt, usufruct being more likely. The idea of the commons is clearly very consistent with the arguments about the necessity of decentralization of power and grassroots democracy. It should be obvious that from this perspective that the term ‘global commons’, in widespread use in mainstream environmental discussions or in institutionalist literature to refer to problems such as global warming or ozone depletion (e.g. Vogler 1995; Buck 1998), is literally nonsensical. However, it supplements the decentralist argument by showing how small-scale democratic communities, working with particular sorts of property systems, are the most likely to produce sustainable practices within the limits set by a finite planet. Both bio-environmentalists and social Greens propose concrete analyses of the origins of environmental degradation and unsustainability, and make far-reaching normative claims about the political changes responding to such a crisis entails. They differ in their analysis broadly between a dualistic account of ‘humanity’ versus ‘nature’, as opposed to a social analysis of the origins of unsustainability in particular social systems and the intertwining of social and ecological crises. But they share a sense of the radical nature of the changes required.

Greening Global Politics How then might global politics be ‘Greened’ (see also Newell 2019)? One of the things that the proponents of all Clapp and Dauvergne’s (2005) positions tend to share is a rather static account of the relationship between political systems and environmental degradation. For example, for bio-­ environmentalists there is an ahistorical naturalizing account of population and economic growth, or in Ophuls (1977) a reification of the states system as having a ‘timeless’ logic that never changes. For some social Greens (e.g. Bookchin 1980), there is equally an identification of ‘the state’ as the problem, as if ‘the state’ is not itself undergoing constant change. Given that political systems are in constant flux, this may create possibilities as well as obstacles to the pursuit of sustainability. We might want to ask what an immanent Green critique of global politics might look like, as opposed to a transcendental Green critique of the (reified) states system. It is in this light that Eckersley’s The Green State (2004) comes to the fore (hers is the fullest expression of this argument, but see also Dryzek et  al. 2003, Barry and Eckersley 2005, or Spaargaren et al. 2006; for an exchange on Eckersley’s book, see the forum published in Politics

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and Ethics Review 2006). Eckersley ends up with similar conclusions to those she draws from ecocentrism in her earlier book. But the argument is developed in much greater detail, and is based not on the transcendental claims of ecocentric ethics but on the importance of an immanent critique of contemporary global politics. That is, she starts from an analysis both of the contemporary anti-ecological tendencies and structures within global politics (for her, these are inter-state anarchy, global capitalism, the limits of liberal democracy) and the contemporary trends that create the possibility of countering these tendencies (environmental multilateralism, ecological modernization, deliberative/discursive democracy). Collectively, Eckersley argues that these three elements create the possibility of an ecological world order that works from existing practices, rather than having to develop a world order anew. Thus she draws heavily on constructivist accounts of international politics (see Chapter 10) to argue that sovereignty need not simply mean relentless hostility and competition between states (as assumed in both eco-authoritarian arguments for world government and in eco-anarchist arguments against the state), but can entail the development of mutual obligations and extensive cooperation, and suggests that the development of environmental multilateralism to date is evidence for the possibilities here. Eckersley draws on accounts of ecological modernization (e.g. Hajer 1995; Christoff 1996; Mol 1996) to suggest that the growth and globalization dynamic of global capitalism is only one possible future for the world economy, while remaining highly critical of the ‘weak’ nature of most actually existing ecological modernization. Finally, she draws on work on deliberative and transnational democracy (Dryzek 1990, 1999; Held 1995; Linklater 1998) to suggest that the former would enable the move to ‘strong’ ecological modernization that would properly ecologize economic processes, and the latter could embed properly the transformations of sovereignty away from the Hobbesian image. Once Green critiques of international politics are understood this way, the door is open for a critical but constructive re-engagement with other International Relations traditions thinking about the way that the states system is undergoing transformation and how such transformations might be pushed in a radical direction. In the environmental sphere, work such as that by Hurrell on challenges to sovereignty and the states system (1994), Shue on global justice and global environmental politics (2014) and Dobson on ecological citizenship (2003) all suggest, in differing ways, how Greens could pursue necessary global political reforms in the manner indicated at a more general level by Eckersley. Most recently, the rapidly emerging literature on multilevel and transnational environmental governance alluded to earlier offers many illustrative examples of the sorts of transformations Eckersley envisages. These have at their core a claim that political authority in international relations is now not the sole preserve of states, but is exercised by a wide range of ‘post-sovereign’ actors (Humphreys et al. 2003; Hale 2020). In the 1990s, Rosenau suggested both in general and in relation to global environmental politics specifically that we were then witnessing a simultaneous shift of authority up to international/transnational institutions and down to local organizations (Rosenau 1992, 1993). In part, these claims were connected to functionalist arguments that the state is simultaneously too small and too big to deal effectively with such change, and thus practices of governance move towards regional and global levels and at the same time towards local levels (e.g. Hempel 1996). More recent literature has documented a dramatic expansion in forms of governance that cross scales from global to local in all sorts of different ways. Bulkeley et al. (2014) discuss sixty different such governance initiatives on climate change, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, the Transition

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Towns movement (see Box 12.1), the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership and the Climate Change and Biodiversity Alliance offset standards. These are organized by various actors – city or regional governments, companies, institutional investors, environmental or development non-governmental organizations, often working in novel collaborative arrangements, but what they have in common is an attempt to work transnationally – across the globe at the sites where they think interventions are needed, not according to the logic of state sovereignty, and at times precisely to fill the gap left by the inadequacy of state-led responses to climate change. Box 12.1 Green Global Politics in Action? The Transition Network The Transition Network (see https://transitionnetwork.org/) is a global network of community organizations focused on transitioning their own communities towards sustainability. It was established in 2005 and currently (2020) has 977 initiatives listed as connected on its website. They are concentrated in Europe and North America, but there are initiatives in a broad range of countries. Each transition works in place to develop specific initiatives and also to effect broad cultural change that will rebuild local economies according to Green principles of sustainability – working within the planet’s limits, decentralizing economic activity and political authority, developing more respon-

sive and responsible local economies. At the same time, the network works to provide possibilities for learning and sharing of ideas, collective support and potentially coordination. The network has been criticized for various specific weaknesses, but nevertheless represents empirically the sort of global political structures and practices Greens tend to argue for – decentralization of much authority to local communities, themselves organized as highly participatory democracies, while enabling globally networked action to solve common problems. For more analyses of the network, see variously Aiken (2012), Feola and Nunes (2014) and Nicolosi and Feola (2016).

These new forms of governance typically entail complex partnership arrangements between diverse actors, attempting to govern specific aspects of environmental degradation in novel ways (see for example Pattberg 2007; Bulkeley et al. 2014). Paradigmatic examples include the Forest Stewardship Council, which engages in transnational certification of timber operations (Cashore et al. 2004), and the Cities for Climate Protection network, which involves many cities around the world collaborating to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). Green theory and critical IR theory could find fruitful conversations around arguments about the possible transformations of forms of political community (Linklater 1998; Chapter 7) and related debates about cosmopolitan or transnational democracy (Held 1995; Dryzek 1999). Of particular interest is the framing of these as ‘polycentric governance’ (Ostrom 2010; Jordan et al. 2018), in part because it is connected to Ostrom’s arguments about the political-ecological value of the commons (discussed earlier). Eckersley and others (see in particular Dryzek 1999; Bäckstrand et al. 2010), including movements such as Extinction Rebellion, make the question of democratic deliberation central to how political life needs to be transformed. While in Environmentalism and Political Theory (1992) it was ecocentric ethics that underpinned political claims about sustainability, in The Green State (2004) Eckersley argues that it is the character of democratic deliberation that underpins (un)sustainable polities: sustainability requires that ‘all those potentially affected by ecological risks ought to have some meaningful opportunity to participate, or be represented, in the determination of policies or decisions that may generate risks’ (2004: 243). This means both that deliberative processes in liberal democracy are inadequately weak, and also that we need deliberative processes that

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do not exclude those beyond the borders of individual states. The main Green criticism here could come from the lines of argument developed by the ‘global ecology’ writers. Eckersley’s account of democratic deliberation questions the uncritical nature of ‘individual preferences’ as invoked by liberal-democratic rhetoric, but fails to question its separation of politics and economics. Thus in the ‘reclaiming the commons’ literature, what is evident is that it is the embeddedness of political institutions in concrete socio-economic forms that engenders sustainable practices, whereas in Eckersley’s account of ecological democracy it is clear that the practices of democratic deliberation and the practices of the production of daily life are rather removed from each other (see also Paterson 2007; Luke 2009). However, what is clear at the same time is that Eckersley’s arguments concerning ecological democracy, if given a ‘decentralist’ twist – that is, if we drop the national state as the starting point for thinking about the site of political activity – become significantly more attractive for most Greens, and an enormously sophisticated and valuable addition to Green arguments. What is perhaps also at stake is Eckersley’s account of contemporary global political developments that inform therefore the ‘limits of the possible’. To repeat, this is for her the emergent potential of environmental multilateralism, ecological modernization and deliberative democracy arising out of inter-state anarchy, global capitalism and liberal democracy. What is interesting in this context is perhaps the lack of a discussion of ‘anti-globalization’ movements, in which Greens have played prominent roles, as well as an acknowledgement that the commons as a form of political economy that Greens want to promote already exists in many areas around the world. If one adds this dimension of contemporary global developments to those Eckersley discusses, then this transforms what one thinks of the potential from decentralism as argued by Greens. These movements can, of course, be analysed as pressures that support more reformist movements developing environmental multilateralism, ecological modernization and discursive democracy. But they can also be analysed as movements generating political change in their own right, embedded in a broader pattern of Green social and political change that challenge the power of global capital, the centralization of power and so on, and act as the agents that help to forge and sustain ecological democracy and citizenship.

T he Anthropocene: Rethinking Green Global Politics? The concept of the Anthropocene is older, but it is only in the last decade or so that it has become the focus of intense reflection across the social sciences. Prior to this, it was the preserve of geologists and a central concept in the shift to ‘earth systems science’ (Wissenburg 2016). But recently, there has been a substantial volume of work arguing that it generates fundamental challenges to how we think about all aspects of the social world, including International Relations. As a concept, of course, it has the relations between human societies and the natural world at its core. The core claim, initially proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000; Crutzen 2002), can be boiled down usefully to two propositions: the idea that humans have become a ‘telluric force’ (i.e. a force shaping the basic composition of the earth); and that this signals the emergence of ‘global environmental shifts of an unprecedented scale and speed’ (Nicholson and Jinnah 2016: 3).

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Key Concept: The Anthropocene The Anthropocene is a claim that human activities have shaped the planet to such an extent that there is no part of the planet not affected by them, and that their effects are deep and extensive enough to warrant naming a new geological age. It

refers simultaneously to the empirical claim about the extent of human effects on the planet and to the normative claim about the rapid acceleration and intensification of risks and dangers associated with these effects.

The first of these entails the argument that the rapid exponential expansion of human activities generates a situation where the geological formation of the planet itself – how new rocks are being laid down – is increasingly driven by these human activities. The accumulation of greenhouse gases and the decline of biodiversity are the two most notable, and crisis-generating, aspects of these, but nuclear explosions and releases, the accumulation of various toxic chemicals, the acidification of oceans and collapse of fish stocks are all parts of the process. There are debates about when to identify as the start of the process, but the period after 1945 is often termed the ‘Great Acceleration’ as a result of being when the great quantitative expansion of these trends has occurred (Steffen et al. 2015). The second aspect is to signal that humanity’s earth-shaping effects signal a series of intertwined crises. Climate change and biodiversity loss remain the two most immediate and potentially devastating to human societies, but ozone loss, collapse in fish stocks and many others are nevertheless also highly damaging and crisis-inducing. Human societies will be forced, and indeed are already being forced in many contexts, to address these effects and deal with the displacements they cause, whether that is through migration, disruption to food production, global diseases or other impacts. While there has been a huge amount of publishing about the Anthropocene, discerning its actual impact on how we think, and particularly how Greens might think, about global politics is more difficult. Certainly, in lots of work using the term, it is taken more or less as a synonym for ‘ecological crisis’, and while its effect has been to widen the range of scholars in International Relations and elsewhere in the social sciences who engage with environmental debates (to be welcomed in and of itself), in many, the way it is either developed and defended or critically interrogated largely reproduces pre-existing debates. Three prominent debates serve to illustrate this point usefully. One is the framing of debates around the ‘good’ versus the ‘bad’ Anthropocene (Dalby 2016; Eckersley 2017; Dryzek and Pickering 2018; Fremaux and Barry 2019). The ‘bad’ Anthropocene envisions a series of disastrous effects of the environmental trends associated with the process, and at the extreme the collapse of human civilizations. The ‘good’ Anthropocene proponents argue that the recognition of humanity’s role in shaping the planet can be understood as enabling a self-­conscious management of the planet through technological innovation, sometimes including active geo-engineering, for the benefit of both the planet and human societies. But this framing is arguably not much more than a reworking of debates going back at least to the 1970s between limits to growth proponents and their critics, characterized at the time by Cotgrove (1982) as ‘Catastrophe or Cornucopia’. A second is focused on a critique of the ‘anthropos’ in the Anthropocene, and specifically the implication that the effects we can see are caused by an undifferentiated humanity, and thus the effect of something intrinsic to human endeavours and/or the simple effect of human population levels. In response, a number of critics have suggested it is more precise to talk of the Capitalocene, that the causal processes by which the rise in greenhouse gases, decline in biodiversity and the various other trends involved have their origins in the specific social dynamics of capitalism – notably

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through colonial expansion, labour exploitation and technological innovation, which is built in not to the logic of ‘humanity’, but rather to that of capital (Chakrabarty 2014; Malm and Hornborg 2014; Moore 2017). This is a largely convincing critique of Anthropocene narratives, but it is nevertheless largely the same as the social Greens’ critiques of bio-environmentalists discussed earlier, and critiques of ecological arguments going back into the 1960s that failed to account for the specificity of how capitalism generates environmental degradation (e.g. Enzensberger 1974). For example, Green IR scholar Dauvergne (2020) makes this sort of analysis of Artificial Intelligence’s largely damaging effects on sustainability perfectly powerfully without recourse to the Anthropocene narrative. A third is the critique of Anthropocene discourse as technocratic (Wissenburg 2016; Chandler et al. 2018). Chandler et al. (2018), for example, argue that the vision of ‘planet politics’ generated by Burke et al. (2016) as an account of the political implications of the Anthropocene remains captured by a technocratic vision of global governance – operating through global coordination and surveillance. Many institutionalists in IR have, as they have worked through the notion of the Anthropocene, reframed environmental governance as ‘earth systems governance’, couched more in the language of complex systems than their earlier thought, and/or through a notion of reflexivity (Biermann 2014; Dryzek 2016; Young 2017). Again, this critique of global (environmental) governance as technocratic is not new and does not depend on the concept of the Anthropocene: as we have seen, lots of ecological critics, an example being Sachs (1993), argued more or less the same about the way ecology had been captured by the forces of globalization in the framing of sustainable development and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development process in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a huge range of broadly post-structuralist literatures in International Relations has made similar points about the ‘biopolitics’ of global governance (see Chapter 9). Perhaps, then, it is the case that the Anthropocene is a repackaging of the sorts of arguments that Greens have been making for decades, as we have seen earlier in this chapter: human societies have had significant and rapidly increasing impacts on the non-human world, with effects that are potentially catastrophic for both humans and non-humans. This is indeed the message of the idea of limits to growth, most notably and used normatively in the arguments for ecocentric ethics. However, there are at least two ways in which the Anthropocene can be understood to pose a fundamental challenge to traditions of Green thought. The first is a temporal question: the Anthropocene implies irreversibility (e.g. Dryzek and Pickering 2018: 8–9). To the extent that Green arguments are premised on some sort of ‘going back’ – returning societies to ‘natural limits’ (as in bio-regionalism for example, or more general invocations of ‘living more simply’), the Anthropocene suggests rather strongly that such arguments are impossible to realize. There is no going back: the human imprint on the planet has permanent effects that cannot be undone. The second is an ontological one: to the extent that ‘nature’ provides a source of inspiration for Green thought – as model, moral value, for example – that source arguably no longer exists in any empirically viable manner. Nature as something external to humanity, to be protected from human intervention, and at the same time provide material, existential, even spiritual value to humans, no longer exists, but rather has become something that is in large part materially made by human activity (Biermann and Lövbrand 2019). On what, then, do Greens base their arguments if nature no longer provides this normative underpinning? One reaction by some Greens has thus been to resist the idea of the Anthropocene, precisely as anthropocentric hubris (Fremaux 2019; Fremaux and Barry 2019). This is often similar to the

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resistance to it within critical scholars in IR as a technocratic project (Chandler et  al. 2018). Wissenburg (2016) combines these critiques, and suggests that some fellow Green thinkers have fallen into the Anthropocene trap, which turns ‘a value-rational fundamental critique into a relatively innocent goal-rational technical problem’ (p.  23). Wissenburg, like Fremaux and Barry, defends core Green principles robustly in the face of this tendency, to argue thus that some of the implications for global politics developed in this chapter, for the shift to more decentralized polities, more heavily reliant on their own immediate resources and environments, rather than pushing for more elaborate global governance schemes, remain valid propositions for Green politics, and certainly something distinctive about Green approaches to International Relations.

Conclusions My main aim in this chapter has been to show that between the two approaches that Clapp and Dauvergne (2005) label bio-environmentalist and social Green, there is a set of theories which can properly be called a Green approach to global politics. While these theories certainly arise out of the problématique of the environmental crisis, or more recently the Anthropocene, it would be a mistake to limit their importance to that ‘issue area’. Rather, their character as theories entails claims about the whole range of ‘issues’ that make up the global political agenda, as well as calling into question the basic character of global politics. Greens make claims about peace and war (both that environmental problems result from militarism but more broadly that war-like practices result from the same world view based on accumulation, domination and exploitation, which lead to unsustainability), about development and the global economy (not only about its environmental unsustainability but also its oppressive character) and about global governance (in various, at times contradictory, ways, as we have seen). For more details on many of these specific areas of Green claims, see Newell (2019), and on global political economy, see Katz-Rosene and Paterson (2018). These claims are not add-on extras to a Green approach, but logical extensions of the character of the claims Greens make. In the introduction to the book (Chapter 1), some of the central questions and distinctions concerning theoretical traditions in International Relations were outlined. Green politics should clearly be regarded as a critical rather than problem-solving theory. It is one, however, that aims to be both explanatory and normative – it tries both to explain a certain range of phenomena and problems in global politics and to provide a set of normative claims about the sorts of global political changes necessary to respond to such problems. Writers within this tradition have to date spent less time engaging in constitutive-theoretical activity – reflecting on the nature of their theorizing per se, although there is attention, in particular among the writers in what I have called the ‘global ecology’ school, to power/knowledge questions (but cf. Doran 1995). For Greens, the central object of analysis and scope of enquiry is the way in which contemporary human societies, including their international or global political relations, are ecologically unsustainable. Such a destructive mode of existence is deplored both because of the independent ethical value held to reside in organisms and ecosystems, and because human society ultimately depends on the successful function of the biosphere as a whole for its own survival. Regarding International Relations specifically, Greens focus on the way in which prevailing political structures and processes contribute to this destruction. This is the root of their rejection of institutionalist

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accounts that suggest institutions can be built to ‘tame’ international anarchy or global capitalism. The purpose of enquiry is thus explicitly normative – to understand how global political structures can be reformed to prevent such destruction and provide for a sustainable human relationship to the planet and the rest of its inhabitants. Like Idealism, the normative imperative is the original impulse in Green politics  – the explanation of environmental destruction comes later. Methodologically, while Greens are hostile to positivism, not least because of its historical connection to the treating of ‘nature’ (including humans) as objects, purely instrumentally, there is no clearly identifiable ‘Green’ methodology. Eckersley (2004: 8–10) proposes ‘critical political ecology’ as a method for Green politics. But this turns out to be the method of immanent critique of Frankfurt School critical theory, with an ecological focus. Finally, Greens share with many other perspectives a rejection of any claimed separation of International Relations from other disciplines. As Chapter 1 suggests, the possibility of the emergence of a distinct Green perspective in International Relations has seen the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries.

Glossary Terms Bio-environmentalism: A variant of Green thought that places emphasis on the interaction between humans as a species and the rest of nature, and starts from seeking to re-embed humanity within nature.

The commons: A specific way in which resources are held, as neither private nor state property. It is central to Green theory, although highly contested as to whether it is ecologically beneficial or disastrous.

Green State: The term developed by Robyn Eckersley to account for the shifts in the forms of the state and global politics entailed in responses to the ecological crisis.

Limits to growth: Refers to a claim that on a finite planet indefinite growth in material consumption is impossible, and thus that approaches to politics need to work within these ecological limits.

Social Greens: A variant of Green thought that insists on the intertwined nature of human social relations and the sustainability of their specific societies.

Further Reading Burke, A., et  al. (2016) ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’, Millennium 44(3):499–523. Clapp, J. and Dauvergne, P. (2005) Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Eckersley, R. (2004) The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Newell, P. (2019) Global Green Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The Ecologist (1993) Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (London: Earthscan).

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY TERRY NARDIN

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International political theory separates itself from international politics when discussion moves from particular issues to general arguments. This chapter considers some of these arguments, giving particular attention to moral and political concerns such as the just uses of military force, justice in the international distribution of wealth and power, and the institutional shape of the global order. But unlike the theories discussed in earlier chapters of this book – realism, Marxism or feminism, for example – international political theory is more inclusive; it identifies the larger field on which those ‘isms’ are deployed. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section traces the emergence of international political theory as an approach within the larger study of international relations, first as a turn from explanation to ethics and then from ethics to politics. The second discusses just war theory and its rivals, pacifism and political realism. The third examines tensions between international and global conceptions of justice in the distribution of wealth and power. The fourth considers theories of global order, which some see as requiring shared values and others respect for different values, and the implications of this dispute for global law and institutions. The final section locates these topics within their historical contexts and explains the recent turn to history in the study of international thought.

Theorizing International Politics International political theory is sometimes distinguished from international relations theory on the ground that it is normative rather than empirical. But this assertion equivocates between whether it is the object of enquiry or the enquiry itself that is normative. If the former, political theory is the disengaged study of norms; if the latter, it means using norms to guide and judge conduct. Political theory, to the degree that it is distinct from politics, aims not to approve or disapprove choices, or to recommend or discourage policies, but to understand the grounds on which choices and policies are judged. The word ‘empirical’ is also problematic, echoing a discredited view of science as accumulating theory-independent facts. Many see IR theory as scientific explanation based on quantification and hypothesis testing. But this is misleading because much IR theorizing – as represented in this book, for example – challenges that understanding. It is interpretive rather than quantitative and epistemologically plural rather than tied to narrow or simplistic conceptions of scientific truth. The separation between IR theory and international political theory may be eroding, as evidenced by creation within the International Studies Association of a diverse

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and inclusive theory section. Also eroding is the assumption that the discipline can ignore past ideas or ideas originating in societies beyond the West. In these ways, international political theory connects explanatory theorizing to moral and political concerns, to issues raised by globalization, and to ideas about international order rooted in different civilizations. Its concerns – ethical, institutional and historical – identify distinct and important dimensions of theorizing about IR. To understand how we have arrived at this inclusive understanding, it is helpful to consider the past half-century of international political theorizing. Among the earliest contributors were the philosophers who began in the 1970s to discuss ethical questions arising from the Vietnam War and the existence of nuclear weapons. The interest in such questions was political and signalled a turn away from the disengaged moral philosophy of the 1950s, which had been concerned with the definition of morality and the ethics of personal conduct rather than public affairs. Moral and political philosophy became applied ethics – the application of moral ideas to questions of war, conscientious objection, foreign aid and other ethically pressing concerns (Cohen et  al. 1974; Beitz et al. 1985). Some philosophers saw themselves as contributing to international ethics or ethics and international affairs, others as treating a subject that has a distinctly political character that is overlooked when the ethical principles used are those governing individual conduct. We neglect the political, the latter argued, if we assume that principles of individual ethics can be applied without alteration to international affairs (Williams 2005). Rescuing a community from famine or genocide differs in kind as well as scale from pulling a drowning child from a pond. International ethics, they argued, is misleading as a name for discussions of justice in international affairs. These require distinguishing institutional from individual duties and recognizing that politics (including international politics) is a distinct sphere of activity whose principles may differ from those used to guide individual conduct. Some critics object that international political theory is an ivory tower activity with little relevance to real life. Others fault it for focusing on inter-state instead of global concerns, on the grounds that politics is increasingly transnational and global. World politics increasingly operates through transnational policy networks or other novel forms of global governance, they argue, rather than through inter-state diplomacy. For these critics, globalization involves changes that will erase the subject of this book by transforming the international order into a global one. But arguments such as these must nevertheless acknowledge the continued importance of territorial states. The globalist response is that even if states continue to exist, one can still challenge conventional assumptions about state sovereignty and the moral significance of national boundaries. International political theory, they argue, should include ‘cosmopolitan’ theorizing that gives proper attention to global governance and global justice. Though philosophers did much to establish international political theory as a field of study, historians of political thought have also contributed to it. Some IR scholars, in contrast, are uninterested in philosophical controversy or the history of international thought except as a way to illustrate or legitimize their concerns. Thucydides is called a political realist, Grotius the father of international law, Hobbes the leading theorist of international anarchy and Kant the first to observe that democracies do not fight with one another. But identifying intellectual ancestors or disciplinary founders is a strikingly unhistorical exercise: genuine historical enquiry does not involve telling practically motivated stories about the past. There is, nevertheless, interest within the field in genuinely historical investigations of the discipline’s past and in the ideas of people who thought about IR before there was a discipline. Historical scholarship has revised our understanding of just

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war theory, the realism–idealism debate and the history of international politics as an academic subject. It has informed investigations of the medieval origins of modern international thought, the states system and empire as alternative models of world order and the significance of religious or ethnic differences in IR. Recent historical scholarship has challenged assumptions about sovereignty, universality and human progress that distorted earlier efforts to write the history of international political thought. Historians of international thought today are less inclined to privilege inter-state over transnational relations. Nor do they offer theories of progress or other meta-­ narratives, despite the persistence of such narratives in popular treatments of ‘the end of history’ or ‘the clash of civilizations’. A more detached and less comprehensive approach to intellectual history has spurred the recovery of forgotten themes, thinkers and texts. These approaches to the study of IR are not entirely distinct. No sharp line divides politics from ethics, global from international affairs or humanistic from scientific inquiries. What are commonly identified as theories of IR can be normative or explanatory. Realism and liberalism prescribe and describe foreign policy. Marxists criticize but also analyse class conflict. Feminist thinking involves describing and explaining gender relations as well as advancing gender equality. Green theory, too, has ethical, policy-oriented and explanatory concerns. The English School in the 1960s emphasized the moral aspects of IR at a time when American scholars were reinventing their discipline in scientific terms. Constructivism is concerned with norms, though more often with how norms shape choices than with the ethical content of those norms. And though critical theorists and post-­ structuralists have ethical concerns, both are sceptical of universal principles or rationally grounded moral judgements. In short, the character of international political theory is complex and contested, as are the boundaries between it and other approaches to IR.

Justice in War Just war theory illustrates what changes when we move from moralizing to theorizing. In some cases, we begin with an unqualified assertion (it’s not wrong to kill in war); in others with a nuanced one (it is permissible to harm non-combatants provided the harm done is not one’s end, nor a means to that end, and does not unfairly distribute costs between those inflicting and those suffering the harm) – sometimes called the principle of double effect. Examining such statements, we might amend or reject them or consider how they relate to other propositions. A theoretical enquiry seldom ends by simply affirming the original proposition. It makes sense to discuss justice in war before turning to international or global distributive justice, for several reasons. First, war is ‘pre-international’: it antedates the modern system of states. It is also ‘extra-international’ when it involves transnational movements and practices such as those of Islamic radicals who reject the modern state (Maher 2016). Second, unlike the distributive principles invoked in debates about economic or social justice, just war principles are clear and consistent, and for that reason relatively stable even though often contested, misunderstood or misused. Third, thinking about justice in war invites us to start with an ancient and universal aspect of human experience. And fourth, the experience is readily accessible. For some, the experience as fighters, bystanders or victims has been first hand. For others, reading military histories or war memoirs, even watching war movies or playing video games, provides knowledge of war and its practices. Though it may be vicarious, selective or distorted, this knowledge invites reflection.

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Thinking about women in war, for example, suggests ways in which war is a gendered experience and makes us wonder how far gender categories pervade the larger field of IR. Stories of people forced to make hard moral choices in war offer another path into the subject. Memoirs or novels that move from the experience of combat to reflections on cruelty, loyalty, friendship and guilt unmediated by the abstractions of just war theory can provide an alternative to those abstractions. Box 13.1 What Is an Atrocity? When we use the word ‘atrocity’, we imply a moral judgement: that the act so described is wrong in a particularly deplorable way. The 1940 Katyn � Forest massacre, in which the Soviets killed 8,000 Polish officers together with twice that number of civilians (Paul 2010), would have been hard to justify – and the murders were, in fact, covered up. One might be tempted to excuse those who in Vietnam rounded up and executed some 400 civilians, including many children, at My Lai in 1968, but it cannot be seriously argued that deliberately killing innocent people is morally justified. The moral justifications for murdering journalists or hounding ‘infidels’ such as the Yazidis asserted by spokesmen for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are contrary to Muslim principles. Rape is common in every war, but the rationalizations that are sometimes offered merely highlight the atrocity. Bombing cities (as in the Second World War) or using chemical weapons against civilians (as the Syrian government has done in its civil war) are understood as atrocious by those who try hypocritically to cover them up and even by those who excuse or justify them. Implicit in the idea of atrocity is the principle that it is wrong to deliber-

ately kill or abuse innocent people. The principle can be examined as well as used. What, for example, is meant by the words ‘innocent’ and ‘deliberately’? One answer is that ‘innocent’, in this context, means not nocentes, in Latin not ‘engaged in harming’, and therefore not properly subject to forcible resistance (Finnis 1996: 27). ‘Deliberately’ means that the harm was not inadvertent but planned and carried out as a matter of policy, either as an end in itself or a means to an end. The idea that innocents should not be deliberately killed  – that doing so is always wrong  – is part of the morality if not always the practice of war, and is basic not only to just war ethics but also to morality itself, as morality is commonly understood. These laws forbid deliberately killing or otherwise harming unresisting civilians (and soldiers, too, if they are wounded or have surrendered), thereby adapting a basic moral idea to the circumstances of war as the principle of ‘noncombatant immunity’ (Walzer 2015: 133–137). By clarifying the grounds for calling an event an atrocity, we come to understand some important principles of just war theory and how they are used and misused.

Moral principles are open to interpretation and therefore to debate. If we think that killing prisoners of war is an atrocity (Box 13.1), does this mean that killing soldiers in combat is not an atrocity? Because they are fighters, soldiers are not ‘innocent’ (as that word is defined in the just war tradition) and for that reason killing them in combat is not usually seen as murder. But some challenge this judgement, along with the definition of innocence on which it rests, arguing that military conscripts are compelled to fight. The same might be said of child soldiers, common in recent years in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African countries. This makes them ‘innocent attackers’ whose deaths in battle are as wrong as the deaths of non-combatants. Others see the deaths of soldiers as a foreseeable, even if not wished-for effect of fighting. According to this view, if the principle of double effect can justify the deaths of bystanders, it can also justify the deaths of combatants. This debate illustrates the philosopher’s characteristic inclination to question conventional distinctions or sometimes to find new ways to defend them (Sagan and Valentino 2019; Walzer 2019).

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The moral responsibility of soldiers invites us to consider culpability more generally. We may think that it is inappropriate to blame someone who has committed a wrong if they acted in ignorance or under duress. Soldiers are sometimes deceived or threatened. Questions about culpability cannot be avoided in war any more than in other areas of life. But such questions are distinct from those of justification: there is a difference between justifying an act as right and excusing the perpetrator for having done wrong. Arguing that a soldier who deliberately kills civilians on the orders of a superior is not guilty of murder might excuse the killer from responsibility, but it cannot justify the killing: responsibility simply moves up the chain of command. How responsibility for war crimes should be defined and apportioned has been considered extensively, especially since the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War. The international criminal court in 2020 was investigating war crimes in a dozen countries, and other cases from civil wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen may be headed there. One way to understand the just war tradition is as the residue of recurring debates about just and unjust uses of military force. It is often contrasted with pacifism and political realism, both of which challenge the distinction between just and unjust wars. These three traditions – pacifism, just war and political realism – can be seen as points on a continuum extending from less to more permissive attitudes towards using military force. For pacifism, war means killing and killing is intrinsically wrong. For this reason, many pacifists argue that no war can be just; but not all pacifists share this judgement. Some say that it is morally wrong for me to kill, which means that I cannot in good conscience fight in any war. But this is an individual ethic, not a political one: it is the view of pre-Constantine Christians and, later, of Mennonites, Quakers and non-religious conscientious objectors. This kind of pacifism should be distinguished from a political commitment to support the abolition of war as an institution. But unlike the conscientious pacifist, the abolitionist does not refuse on principle to fight. Instead, abolitionists stress the importance of establishing arrangements for preventing war. Finally, there is a kind of pacifism, sometimes called non-violence, that urges passive opposition to oppression as an alternative to using force. Non-violent resistance, its advocates argue, is morally superior to military force and sometimes more effective. Political realism, too, has different versions. One is moral scepticism, the argument that war is outside the realm of moral judgement. Another is reason of state, which understands war to be an instrument of policy that may require ignoring moral constraints. The argument here is that war-­ related decisions should be guided by prudence, which is the ability to anticipate consequences, not by moral principles. Force when used should be necessary and proportionate, but using force is not prohibited if it is supported by a careful weighing of costs and benefits. Realism therefore differs from militarism, which glorifies war or defends it on religious or ideological grounds. Yet the line between realism and militarism can be hard to discern. For the Romans as for Machiavelli, ‘glory’ could be both means and end: the glorious victor, like the chest-pounding gorilla, ensures his dominance by intimidating potential rivals. How these types of realism are related to one another as well as to other types (such as ‘structural’, ‘neo’ or ‘critical’ realism) is a topic for ongoing discussion (Jørgensen 2018). The just war tradition does not, like pacifism, reject war as a matter of principle or deny its efficacy. Nor, in contrast to political realism, does it exclude war from the jurisdiction of morality and law, or limit that jurisdiction. For the just warrior, any decision to use military force must involve principled judgement as well as prudential calculation. Interest alone cannot dictate when

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and how a state should choose to wage war or an individual to participate in it. There are justified and unjustified uses of military force and therefore just and unjust wars. And just as there are different strands of pacifism and realism, there are different strands within the just war tradition, each a historically distinguishable discourse of war. One of these strands was influentially developed by St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas reduced a long list of medieval just war criteria to three: just cause, proper authority and right intention (Barnes 1982). The just cause criterion is that a war must aim to rectify a wrong or to punish it. Aquinas also held that rulers have a duty and therefore the right to suppress violence inside their realms, including that perpetrated by subordinate lords, and subsequent thinkers extended this principle to cover relations between sovereigns. But the Thomistic tradition no longer holds that one state can lawfully punish another, for that would make the punishing state the judge in its own dispute with the state punished (Finnis 1996: 20–24). As this difficulty implies, a just cause is not sufficient; a just war must also be authorized by a superior authority such as the United Nations Security Council. And because Thomistic just war theory is not only a theory of enacted law but also a moral theory, it adds a third criterion, right intention, which concerns the internal motive or spirit in which a person fights. Those engaged in fighting, from sovereigns down to troops in the field, must not be motivated by profit, hatred or a lust for battle. International law was identified in Europe for many centuries with natural law, the moral law known by reason. Since the end of the 18th century, it has come to be understood as resting on custom and treaty, which are conventional rather than products of natural reason. Yet even though disputes about the sources of international law continue, there is agreement that it is permissible for a state to use force in self-defence against foreign aggression. A state may defend itself against an aggressor because it provides the legal order that protects the security and well-being of its people. But not everyone shares this view. Some see the state, or at least certain states, as threats to well-being. Others reject it on theological grounds. There is a Jewish sect, Neturei Karta, that declines to recognize the state of Israel because it was founded by human agency before the coming of the Messiah. Medieval Muslim theology, embraced today within Islam as a political ideology, has no room for territorial states on the European model. Instead, it sees the character of world order as defined by non-territorial religious communities and distinguishes the community of the faithful, Muslim believers, from everyone else. This is not far removed from St Augustine’s theology of the two cities. The state-centric strand of just war thinking presumes a view of the proper ordering of human affairs that is at odds with other views, within and beyond the West. A focus on the state pulls just war theory towards political realism, but there is a limit to their convergence. For the political realist, every state has a right to preserve itself, but this paradoxically implies that a war can be just on both sides: even an aggressor might have to fight to preserve its independence, as Japan did towards the end of the Second World War. This ‘relativism of patriotism’, as it has been called (Tuck 1999: 31–34), is not the claim that each side believes that its cause is just; it is the more radical claim that a war can actually be just on both sides. It is by denying this claim that even statist versions of just war theory differentiate themselves from political realism. In just war theory, one side is the aggressor and the other a defender. The aggressor is a criminal whose attack the defender can justifiably resist. But the aggressor is not necessarily the side that strikes first, for aggression can occur without force having been used at all. A state can pre-empt an imminent attack, but it cannot justly wage preventive war against a powerful but not (yet) aggressive neighbour. But though the line between pre-emption and prevention is not sharply drawn – it

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shifts its place depending on contingencies – there is still some distance between a limited doctrine of pre-emption and the claim that a government can do whatever it thinks is necessary to deal with security threats. The tilt of ‘political’ just war theory towards realism is most evident in arguments for overriding just war limits in situations of supreme emergency (Walzer 2004: 33–50) or in arguments justifying nuclear deterrence, a practice that rests on the threat to deliberately kill innocent people (Finnis et al. 1988). Here just war theory comes close to, or even collapses into, reason of state. To argue that moral limits must give way in emergencies implies that normally forbidden means might be warranted in responding to suicide bombings or other kinds of terrorism. Consequentialist arguments for choosing ‘the lesser evil’ in what has been construed after 9/11 as ‘the global war on terrorism’ include arguments for violating basic civil rights or legalizing torture in ‘ticking bomb’ situations. Such arguments rethink the relationship between justice and expediency, while at the same time revealing contradictory understandings of justice itself.

From International to Global Justice As just war theory illustrates, one way to understand justice in IR is through an analogy with the state as a community of citizens. If citizens must avoid interfering as they choose in each other’s affairs, so must states. If states are sovereign, this means that one state must not interfere in another’s internal affairs except to thwart violation of its independence or territory. International law forbids both ‘aggression’ (the wrongful use of force by one state against another) and ‘intervention’ (wrongfully using force within the territory of another state). But there is also a significant disanalogy: unlike civil society, the society of states is without a superior authority to determine the rights of its members. It is, in the words of Hedley Bull, an ‘anarchical society’ – anarchical in that it is without a central authority, but still a society ordered by common interests and rules (Bull 2012). Framed in this way, the theory of international society, like just war theory, can be seen as rejecting both a state-justifying realism and a state-denying cosmopolitanism for a position that acknowledges that states have rights while prescribing limits on what states can rightly do. Debates within the international society school pit ‘pluralists’, for whom international society is a framework for coexistence among different peoples, against ‘solidarists’, who think that it requires shared ends that states cooperate to promote. The argument against solidarism is that it improperly limits human diversity by demanding that states cultivate similar values and pursue shared goals, which implies cultural uniformity. The argument against pluralism is that it privileges state sovereignty and offers an unacceptably thin conception of global justice. Solidarists argue that the pluralist idea of international coexistence on the basis of common rules might once have been important but ‘cannot be applied satisfactorily to the conditions of global political life in the twenty-first century, which require the identification of substantive collective goals and the creation of institutionalized structures of governance to implement them’ (Hurrell 2007b: 298). According to this view, agreed ends and managerial direction to bring them about are urgently needed to cope with dire global challenges. It is not clear, however, that solidarism beats pluralism as an approach to global justice. John Rawls defends a pluralist view in The Law of Peoples (1999b). He argues in that work that political, economic and cultural differences that divide nations are tolerable, provided they are consistent

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with principles that all can accept as a reasonable basis for international order. These principles, which Rawls thinks are the basis of contemporary international law, require that states respect one another’s sovereignty and territory, observe treaty obligations and limits on the conduct of war, protect human rights and cooperate in assisting ‘burdened’ states to become more just by alleviating poverty and reducing corruption. States are permitted to use force only in self-defence or to protect innocent people elsewhere from gross human rights abuses. These principles imply that states should cooperate to deter or suppress internal crimes against humanity as well as international aggression. The pluralism that remains when such violence has been thwarted is the pluralism of a just international order. Global justice does not require that states disappear; nor does it require that every state observe liberal-democratic principles. But, Rawls argues, it does require that states with different cultures and political systems coexist on the basis of rules that respect those differences within reasonable limits. Against this pluralism, Rawls’s critics argue that a morally legitimate international society is one whose members are morally legitimate states. A legitimate international society cannot tolerate illegitimate states as equal members of international society (Martin and Reidy 2008). The critics differ, however, in what they mean by moral legitimacy. Some think that a morally legitimate state respects and protects basic human rights, others that only a democratic state can be legitimate. For pluralists, arguments of this sort rely on an indefensibly narrow view of legitimacy. Principles that ground public order in one society may not make sense in other societies. As Rawls sees it, liberaldemocratic principles constitute a defensible, but not the only defensible ‘comprehensive doctrine’ for ordering a state. But the liberalism that is appropriate to international society – ‘political liberalism’ – respects the right of communities to live according to principles compatible with their own comprehensive doctrines. Just as liberal democracy prescribes tolerating non-liberal persons and groups, provided that they observe the law, political liberalism at the international level prescribes tolerating non-liberal societies, provided they observe international law, which today requires that states respect and protect human rights. Political liberalism rests on the idea of ‘public reason’, which prescribes that when arguing across doctrinal lines liberals must frame their arguments to find the common ground. In this, Rawls is close to Jürgen Habermas and others who connect justice with principles that would emerge in free public debate. But it is parochial to insist that every society must be a liberal democracy. Framing the dispute between pluralists and solidarists as a debate about moral legitimacy explains their differences on the limits of international toleration. Both draw a line limiting toleration beyond which a misbehaving state can be justly resisted, but they draw that line in different places. The pluralist forbids international aggression and crimes against humanity but is willing to tolerate lesser moral breaches. The solidarist would condemn a regime for violating a much wider range of human rights or democratic principles. One way to reconcile plurality and communal solidarity is to imagine an ascending scale of political orders. Kant, for example, distinguishes two levels of international association. At the first level are states that recognize the principle of national self-determination, renounce aggression, observe the rules of war and commit themselves to reducing the influence of what would later be called ‘the military-industrial complex’ by avoiding standing armies and a large military debt. At the second are states that meet a higher standard, constituting an association whose members acknowledge the rule of law internally as well internationally (Kant 1991: 93–108). Kant’s distinction is illustrated by the difference between the United Nations, a loose association many of whose

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members are not rule-of-law states, though all are committed (or pretend to be committed) to coexistence, and the European Union, which is a confederation of rule-of-law states. Rawls offers a similar typology in which ‘well-ordered peoples’ achieve a degree of justice in their relations with one another that cannot be achieved in their relations with societies that are not well ordered. The well-ordered category includes not only liberal democracies but also consultative hierarchical regimes that respect the most important human rights, including religious freedom, and allow citizens some input into governing. Societies that are not well ordered are absolutist, corrupt, ineffective or violent. Like Kant, who hopes that an expanding community of rule-of-law states will gradually replace minimal coexistence (Kant 1991: 108–114), Rawls envisions a community of well-ordered states (Rawls 1999b: 44–54) as the shape of a just world order. We can get a clearer view of the issues in the pluralist–solidarist debate by considering the topic of humanitarian intervention: the use of military force by one state inside the territory of another, without the latter’s consent, to protect people who are not the intervening state’s own nationals from violence committed or permitted by the government of the target state. The usual objection to humanitarian intervention is that using force inside the territory of another state challenges the non-intervention principle and the domestic analogy that supports it. Just as citizens have a duty to respect each other’s autonomy and bodily integrity, governments must respect the political sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states. If a state is entitled to manage its own affairs without interference, then other states are not entitled to exercise their authority, which includes using force, within its territory. Armed intervention, for any purpose, is aggression. But this blanket prohibition ignores the justification of political sovereignty and territorial integrity: that states ensure the security and well-being of their inhabitants. Sovereign authority is justified only when it respects basic rights. If a state violates basic human rights, or allows those rights to be violated, the justification fails and the offending state forfeits its immunity to intervention. It is widely acknowledged today that every government has a duty to respect and protect the rights of the people it governs and that if it cannot the duty passes to the international community. The main difference between humanitarian intervention and what some call ‘the responsibility to protect’ is that those who favour the latter hold that the duty is collective and that the intervention must be authorized by the international community (Bellamy and Dunne 2016). The idea of humanitarian intervention can also be challenged on the ground that military intervention, no matter how well intentioned, is often ineffective, even disastrous, in execution. Using military force to protect the inhabitants of another state is impractical, even when it is morally justified. But this pragmatism does not deny the moral significance of the idea. If people are attacked by their own government or their government cannot protect them, the duty to defend their rights falls elsewhere and intervention can be a way to perform it. The duty rests not only on beneficence but also on respect for individual freedom, understood as the right to set and pursue one’s own ends without unwarranted interference. When this condition is met, there is independence, and when it is not, domination. In extreme cases, between nations, this domination involves massacres, expulsions and other kinds of mass violence. The principle that independence (non-domination) must be respected, and when necessary protected, grounds a general duty to resist such violence, and this, in some cases, might require international action. International justice requires not only that states treat each other justly, as the domestic analogy implies, but also that they concern themselves with the rights of people even against their own governments. This formula makes explicit the ‘cosmopolitan’ basis of ‘international’ justice.

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Key Concept: Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism in political theory is the view that in addition to the laws of their own political communities, human beings are subject to the laws of a notional universal community – the cosmopolis, from the Greek cosmos (world) and polis (state). The laws of this universal community rest not on custom or enactment but on nature, by

which the Stoics, who held this view, meant that these laws were binding on human beings as rational creatures and could be known through the use of human reason. The idea of a universal morality uniting all human beings in a moral community has particular resonance when actual communities are corrupt or have collapsed.

There is, then, no absolute distinction between international and global justice. Though in some contexts the word ‘global’ has displaced ‘international’, what it means is often unclear. Global can be a synonym for universal or cosmopolitan, but its connection with the planet earth in the present epoch undercuts the claim to universality. These ambiguities carry over into the expression ‘global justice’, which has yet to acquire an agreed meaning. As often used, it covers everything pertaining to justice in world affairs except justice in war, a topic oddly excluded from many books with global justice in the title. Or it may stand for limits on national or cultural differences, or for a regime of international criminal law able to hold political leaders and their subordinates accountable for war crimes and other grave human rights abuses. For the most part, however, global justice means distributive justice, which in turn is understood to require ameliorating (absolute) poverty and reducing (relative) economic inequality (Armstrong 2012). Efforts are sometimes made to connect the themes of just war, humanitarian responsibility, economic inequality, cultural diversity and political order under the umbrella of global justice (Caney 2005). But because the global justice project is without a clear and consistent definition of justice and a coherent theoretical framework, it must be regarded as unfinished. To make the idea of global justice coherent, two other ideas are necessary. The first is the idea of universal principles that prescribe how people should treat one another as human beings, rather than as members of a particular community. These principles constitute what was once understood as natural law and is now called human rights, though the two are in many ways distinct. As these expressions suggest, principles of global justice prescribe obligations for everyone, even though not everyone acknowledges their authority: they are universal principles and it is impermissible to violate them, regardless of local norms. If this reasoning is sound, a theory of global justice must be ‘cosmopolitan’ in the sense that it rests on universal principles, not local ones. But distinguishing between the two is contentious: one person’s universal is another’s local. The second necessary idea is that of duty. To say that something is a matter of justice is to say that it involves duties, and this implies principles on which those duties are based. These principles also ground the rights of those to whom a duty is owed. But not all principles, even universal ones, are justifiably enforceable and therefore a matter of ‘justice’ – some principles concern values such as utility, humanity, generosity or compassion that are not necessarily enforceable. A coerced charitable act, if the intention behind it matters, is not an expression of charity. Furthermore, an act may be desirable as a matter of personal virtue or public policy yet still fall outside the domain of justice. Principles of justice, according to one view, prescribe properly enforceable duties. Principles of global justice, according to this view, are universal moral principles that could without moral impropriety be imposed as part of civil, international or supranational law. Central to an effort to theorize justice in this way must be a theory of morally permissible coercion (Ripstein 2009). Such

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a theory narrows the definition of justice while making it clearer and more coherent, and it offers the basis for a theory of global justice that embraces both justice in war and the just distribution of wealth and power. If both just war and distributive justice are matters of ‘justice’, there must be a shared definition of that term that connects them (Nardin 2006).

From Global Justice to Global Order There is a long-running debate on whether global justice can be achieved through international law or requires supranational institutions whose authority supersedes that of states. Some hold that a just global order can be secured only by strengthening global institutions. One argument for this conclusion is that states can no longer respond effectively to many of the challenges they face because these challenges are often global rather than local. Another is that justice can be realized only on the basis of a shared body of law, and this means that global justice requires a global legal order. Still another argument is that achieving global justice requires novel political institutions because states as they exist are morally illegitimate. According to this view, a state is morally legitimate only if its laws are the product of uncoerced collective choices. The condition that a state be legitimate in this way follows from the coercive character of political community, for to enforce illegitimate laws is to violate the independence of its members. But a theory of global justice cannot ignore the rights of states because these rights are grounded on the moral rights of those governed. Nor can it ignore international law, whose authority derives from the rights of states. It would seem, then, that in principle a society of states is no less legitimate than a global society. If a state can be legitimate or illegitimate, so can a society of states or a global state. If territorial states are illegitimate, it is hard to see how a global state could be legitimate. Debates about economic inequality illustrate the tension between state-centric and global conceptions of international order. In the 1970s, the debate focused on the gap between rich and poor countries and on demands for a ‘new international economic order’ in which wealth and power would be redistributed. Developed states would be required to acknowledge the right of less-­ developed states to control their natural resources, seize foreign-owned assets and settle compensation claims according to their own laws. The developed states would agree to terms of trade favourable to commodity-exporting countries, share their technology with those countries and increase their levels of foreign aid. Distributive justice in this context meant redistributing wealth and power from rich to poor countries. This is not at all the same as redistributing wealth and power within a country. Foreign aid can even increase inequality in poor countries if, as is often the case, the aid is handed to or misappropriated by corrupt elites. The proposals for a new international economic order advanced by the new states during that period did not challenge the state-­ centric premises of the existing international order. Theorists of distributive justice have since begun to argue that redistribution must be global rather than international. Here again, Rawls has been at the centre of the debate. As the leading theorist of justice following the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls disappointed those who thought that he should have applied the principles articulated in that book internationally. But for Rawls, the principles of distributive justice he defended are principles for a liberal-democratic state. Rawls’s reason for ignoring the topic of global justice is that in a theory of justice as fairness, which is what he claims his theory to be, distributive justice means the fair allocation of benefits and

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burdens within a society understood by its members as a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage’ (Rawls 1999a: 4). International society is not such a venture, he argues. This claim provoked the rejoinder that economic interdependence was transforming the international system into a scheme of social cooperation by linking national economies in a single global economy. If principles of distributive justice apply within a national economy, it is inconsistent to hold that they do not apply in the world economy (Beitz 1999). But this argument had the perverse result of implying that principles of distributive justice apply most strongly between countries with tightly integrated economies, such as those of Western Europe, and least between rich and poor countries with few economic ties (Singapore and Paraguay, for example). Instead of challenging the proposition that it is not unjust to ignore the well-being of people, no matter how wretched, with whom we have only incidental contact, it seemed to reinforce it. The idea that a society is a scheme of social cooperation for the production of collective benefits is in any case at odds with the liberal conception of the state as a framework for the coexistence of individual wills: a civil order, not a collective enterprise. Imagining the world as a single society does not settle the question of what kind of society it should be. Another version of the argument that the world is not yet a global society is the one earlier identified as ‘solidarist’: that a global society presupposes shared values supporting an agreed scheme of global social cooperation and a ‘meaningful global justice community’ (Hurrell 2007b: 317). For those who make this argument, the ideal of global distributive justice is an invitation to construct the global community it requires. Others regard shared meanings as less relevant in determining global duties than the consideration that human needs know no borders. Affluent peoples should assist those who are impoverished, and this moral duty is independent of economic relationships or cultural affinities. The degree to which people share meanings or have common goals may explain their willingness to help one another, but it is irrelevant to their duty to treat one another justly (Van Parijs 2007: 644). The duty to relieve poverty is not a special obligation, like the obligation to care for our children or elderly parents; it is a general obligation premised on our common humanity. We have a duty to assist the ‘distant needy’ (Chatterjee 2004) as well as those closer to home. This debate, sometimes portrayed as a debate between ‘communitarians’ and ‘cosmopolitans’, has a long history, and probably a long future. Rawls’s reply, in The Law of Peoples, does not deny that well-off societies should help economically burdened societies establish just and effective institutions. But the principles of distributive justice aspired to by some in well-off societies do not apply globally because those principles assume a comprehensive doctrine, liberal egalitarianism, that is acknowledged in some societies but not in others and cannot be made a doctrine for all if legitimate cultural differences are to be respected (Rawls 1999b: 105–120). According to Rawls’s idea of public reason, principles for ameliorating global poverty are principles that could be acknowledged by all, not those particular to the views of liberal egalitarians (Rawls 1999b: 121–128). This amounts to saying that principles of economic distribution are, within wide limits, principles of choice, not justice. They may represent a desirable goal but, unlike basic human rights and rules against violence, they do not prescribe enforceable duties. Against this, one could argue that in many societies economic inequalities are so great as to constitute oppression and to be unjust for that reason. Underlying the argument that global poverty is a matter of distributive justice is a relative standard. When theorists of global justice emphasize the gap between rich and poor, they imply that injustice arises from inequality or unfair benefits (Pogge 2008) rather than from the mere fact

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of poverty. If everyone were equally poor, there would (on this theory) be much privation but no injustice. This has led some to conclude that relieving poverty is better understood as a matter of humanity or beneficence than of justice (Campbell 2007), a point also made by those feminists who view global poverty from the perspective of an ethics of care. Others argue that the injustice in poverty is not a matter of either relative or absolute welfare but of exploitation and other kinds of domination (Walzer 1983; Ripstein 2009: 267–299). With arguments such as these, the global poverty debate has been turning away from distributive justice to a concern with freedom, capability and non-domination. The idea of a broad responsibility on the part of the international community to ameliorate poverty implies that there is an even broader responsibility to resist domination everywhere (Young 2011). David Miller relies on the idea of responsibility in discussing global justice, but though he distinguishes ‘moral responsibility’ (by which he means culpability for wrongdoing) from what he calls causal responsibility, he does not consistently distinguish culpability from duty (Miller 2007). But the two are distinct: one can have a duty to do something yet be excused for failing to perform that duty because of ignorance, duress, insanity or some other condition that lessens culpability. We judge the rightness of an act according to rules that prescribe duties and confer rights. But we also judge the responsibility of agents, whether acting rightly or wrongly, in relation to their motives and the extent to which their acts are voluntary. Agents cannot be blamed for acts, no matter how wrong, unless they are responsible in this sense of the term. Using the word ‘responsibility’ to encompass both duty and culpability obscures the distinction between them. If there is a responsibility to protect that is broader than humanitarian intervention, whose responsibility is it? Internationalists think that states have duties to maintain order, respect human rights, relieve poverty, settle international disputes and reverse global warming. Globalists apportion such duties among a wider range of participants, including private persons acting through international advocacy groups in an emerging global ‘civil society’ and public officials coordinating their activities through transnational agencies or networks. Paralleling the concern with ‘responsibility’ in the discourse of global order is a concern with ‘institutions’, though whether the institutions in question are supposed to be legal ones is sometimes unclear (Kuper 2004). In the past, theorists of global order saw a universal legal system as the ideal towards which the world should be moving. Theorists now speak of ‘global governance’, by which they mean the management of global policies through the activities of a diversity of governmental and nongovernmental institutions without central or supranational direction or ‘world government’. Key Concept: Globalization Globalization means the internationalizing of trade and finance, the emergence of transnational networks, increasing use of English, instantaneous communication over any distance and the erosion of state sovereignty. Accompanying these trends are problems of financial and political stability,

resource depletion and climate change that are globally important and require global solutions. Though some see globalization as a recent phenomenon, others argue that it has been going on for centuries, generating recurring debates on the proper character of world order.

According to the idea of global governance, both public and private decisions contribute to the norms that regulate world affairs. These decisions arise within a system of horizontal interactions in

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which officials in different branches of government work with their counterparts in other countries and with bankers, scientists and activists outside government to generate appropriate norms. But whether this decentralized transnational system can solve major global problems – whether a globalized world is actually governable – remains an open question (Whitman 2005). Those who are optimistic about global governance believe that it can deal with global problems more effectively than traditional diplomacy (Slaughter 2004). Others are sceptical, pointing to imprecision in the idea of governance and the exaggerated expectations its advocates have invited (Weiss and Wilkinson 2019). Critics worry that given the complexity and speed of globalization, global governance can weaken democratic participation and accountability, and thereby undermine the rule of law. They also worry that theories of global governance blur the distinction between law and non-law in speaking of regulatory regimes, soft law and private authority, treating law as an instrument of policy while forgetting its importance as a constraint on policymaking. The distinction between law and policy is blurred when public deliberation is displaced by administrative decision-­making and procedures ignored for the sake of executive efficiency. The rule of law is challenged when emergency powers are asserted, but it is also eroded when law is displaced by policy (‘deformalization’) or divided into functionally distinct regulatory regimes managed to advance particular interests (‘fragmentation’). Both practices weaken the public realm and the legal order on which justice depends (Koskenniemi 2007; Cohen 2012). Paralleling the idea of the free public realm within the modern state is the idea of a global public realm for deliberating about the laws of an emergent global polity (Höffe 2007; Dryzek 2011: 177–197). In these deliberations, the idea of global justice would connect with ideas about democracy and the rule of law. The bundle of concerns that arises here is sometimes identified as ‘global constitutionalism’. This, it turns out, is a topic with a long history in Western legal thought (Goldman 2007; Lang and Weiner 2017). Global governance advocates understate the importance of formal law for democracy, justice and rational deliberation. Democracy presupposes deliberation within a legally constituted community. Public deliberation involves considering the contextual desirability of the laws of such a community. Because law prescribes obligations, public deliberation concerns those obligations that can properly be imposed by law. Theorists of global democracy overlook this point when they detach deliberation from making decisions about law, as if ‘democracy’ were just a matter of talk, not a legally constituted mode of government. Deliberative democracy makes sense only when what is being deliberated are the laws according to which citizens live together. Given a growing appreciation of the connection between justice and law, the global justice debate has increasingly become a debate about global legal order. It has also moved beyond the claim that justice must be global as opposed to international. It is widely understood that universal obligations can be implemented locally, that morally imperfect states can be morally legitimate and that even if globalization is eroding sovereignty, states continue to engage the loyalty of their citizens. The need for statecraft may have become more complex; it has certainly not disappeared, nor has international law been transcended by a global legal order in which states no longer figure (Nardin 2019). For better or worse, international law provides a way of ordering the globe whose rationale is moral as well as pragmatic. And this means that a theory of global order must acknowledge the role of states as well as that of transnational regimes and organizations. Instead of choosing between the international and the global, theorists must acknowledge both. And if law is to be kept in the picture, international theorizing must be sceptical of arguments for ‘global governance’ as a preferred alternative to global government through supranational institutions. Those institutions could (as theorists from Kant to Rawls have imagined) take the form of an expanding confederation of rule-of-law states. For

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this, the European Union remains a model, despite Brexit and other recent troubles. Periodic financial crises, resurgent authoritarianism, the erosion of institutions and an endless succession of civil wars underline the importance of oversight and accountability in any global order.

The History of International Thought Topics prominent in the current global order debate – the relationship of universal principles to local practices, shared norms protecting victims of oppression, and transnational institutions  – invite comparison with earlier debates. These include classic controversies such as those over the Spanish conquest of America, the civilizing mission of European empires and the dependence of peace on enlightened public opinion. Historians of political thought have paid more attention to internal than to international politics, touching on the latter only at the margins of their inquiries. But in recent years, research on past thinkers and texts has established the history of international thought as a recognized speciality within the fields of political theory and IR (Bain and Nardin 2017). Theorists of IR often draw inspiration from their predecessors, as Hobbes did from Thucydides or Rousseau from Saint-Pierre. But one cannot learn from a text without wondering whether one has understood it correctly, and to do this one must notice that words change their meaning over time and in translation. One must know not only the text but also its historical context. This means investigating its author’s intentions, the assumptions, conventions and shared meanings on which he or she could draw, how the text came to be written and rewritten, and other matters that we would understand to be historical rather than theoretical. These points, which have assumed the status of orthodoxy in the study of the history of political thought, are often ignored by IR scholars. It is all too easy for those interested in international affairs to read old authors as if they were dealing with our questions rather than questions of their own. To understand those authors, we must know the questions they were trying to answer, and this means understanding the discourses that are the contexts of their texts. Those discourses do not determine what can or cannot be said – original thinkers challenge conventional meanings  – but their historical circumstances provide clues for understanding what those authors were thinking. Similarly, to locate a text within a tradition, one must know how the author’s contemporaries and successors understood it, and this too requires historical evidence and judgement (Jahn 2006: 12–17; Holland 2010). To study international thought in a genuinely historical manner, one must avoid reading present concerns into the past. It is tempting to recruit imagined ancestors such as Thucydides or Grotius to support one’s conclusions, but there are dangers in doing this. The historian of international thought therefore cultivates a critical attitude towards the field’s intellectual inheritance. Against the familiar claim that Thucydides is a political realist, for example, historical scholarship supports a more complex portrait of him as a trenchant moralist (White 1984; Johnson 1993). Instead of honouring Grotius as the father of international law or making him stand for a constructed tradition of international theorizing (Lauterpacht 1946), we can now read him in relation to his own life and times as a theologian, humanist and politician who was in some ways more medieval than modern and in others closer to Hobbes than is usually thought (Van Ittersum 2006). It is anachronistic to treat Grotius as a theorist of ‘international society’ when there is scant evidence that he had any such idea. And it is misleading to emphasize his remarks on sociability

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while ignoring those on self-preservation, especially when there is evidence that both were politically motivated. Nor does it make sense to call Grotius an advocate for peace or for morality in the conduct of war when he defends aggression, conquest, looting and the slaughter of non-­combatants as lawful and just (Hathaway and Shapiro 2017). The traditional portrait of Thomas Hobbes as an archetypal political realist and theorist of international anarchy is also getting a remake. Reading Hobbes as a political realist neglects the different forms that realism can take, conflating moral scepticism with political realism and leaving the character of Hobbes’s alleged realism unresolved. It also fails to notice that Hobbes, like Thucydides, was an ironist and moralist. Nor is it plausible in the face of careful historical scholarship to read Hobbes, in the conventional manner, as a theorist of international anarchy (Malcolm 2002). Those who in the early 20th century were establishing the independence of IR as a field of study identified Hobbes as a theorist of international anarchy only after they had chosen anarchy as an organizing idea for the emerging discipline (Schmidt 1998; Armitage 2013). Hobbes the realist or the theorist of anarchy are caricatures that do little to strengthen the arguments he is recruited to support. Instead of relying on categories dictated by current concerns, the historian reads thinkers who wrote about war, diplomacy, empire and trade through lenses appropriate to their circumstances. In discussing the 16th and 17th European centuries, for example, the categories of humanism and scholasticism are more illuminating than those of realism and internationalism (Tuck 1999). In place of timeless ‘traditions’ of political and international thought, such as realism and idealism, historians sometimes speak contextually-specific ‘languages’ (Pagden 1987), such as Thomistic natural law in the debate over the treatment of indigenous populations in the Caribbean and Latin America (‘the Indies’), modern (or ‘Protestant’) natural law in 17th-century German thought and the discussion of commerce in 18thcentury Britain. This reminds us that a language of ideas, like a natural language, can be used to say different things and therefore to disagree as well as to agree. The word ‘language’ lends itself less easily than ‘tradition’ to the idea of doctrinal unity, though any tradition is to some extent a tradition of debate (questions) as well as doctrine (answers): even those who agree about many things cannot agree about everything. The traditions of just war and reason of state, for example, each reveal on close study multiple strands and internal disagreements. And from yet another point of view, these traditions can be seen as developing in conversation with one another. They are strands in a more inclusive tradition of discourse concerning the relationship between morality and prudence in public affairs. IR identifies an idea that is itself historically specific. It best fits the period between the emergence of the European state in the 17th century and global institutions in the 20th. The word international (like comparable words in other languages) was not available to Europeans living before the middle of the 17th century, which means that to read Vitoria or Grotius as theorists of IR, as we understand that subject today, is to court anachronism. But if ‘international’ presupposes a world of territorial states, some other word is needed for relations between tribes, cities, dynastic kingdoms and colonies, none of which are ‘states’ in the modern sense of the term. The word ‘foreign’ (or its equivalent) is probably as old as the idea of a distinct people, which makes an expression such as foreign affairs more suitable than IR for use across broad swaths of time and space. The same can be said of war, trade and diplomacy, which can be understood in ways that do not depend on the institutional forms they acquired in particular times and places. Diplomatic representation, for example, can exist apart from the institution of the resident ambassador, which was invented in the Renaissance and is therefore distinctively modern (Mattingly 1955). Combining to resist imperial hegemony may have a long history, but ‘the balance of power’ as a self-conscious

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policy of combining to preserve the states system by defending the independence of its members against imperial hegemony is, again, a distinctly modern idea (Churchill 1948). In our allegedly postmodern period, the category ‘international’ is being reconsidered in a world being transformed by globalization, though whether inter-state relations are disappearing remains contested. What cannot be contested is the importance of transnational concerns such as feminism and environmentalism (each of which has a chapter in this book). It would also be a mistake to overlook the globalist discourses of earlier periods. The claim that we now live in ‘one world’ (Singer 2002) – that political, military, economic and physical events around the world have become so interconnected as to constitute ‘a closed system’ – was a trope of geopolitics a century ago (Mackinder 1919: 29–30). And at the moral level, the idea that people everywhere are citizens of a universal moral community, the cosmopolis, goes back to the Stoics. This might not count as ‘globalism’ if we see the latter as distinctly modern, but it is certainly cosmopolitan in discounting the moral significance of the political boundaries and other local attachments. Pre-modern conceptions of natural law (moral precepts binding on all rational beings) and the law of nations (rules common to the laws and customs of different peoples) are recycled in today’s cosmopolitan theories of human rights and global justice. Looking for universalist themes in the history of international thought can result in reframing topics such as international trusteeship, which was in tension with the idea of universal rights, or decolonization, which was arguably as much concerned with international reform as with national self-determination (Getachew 2019). It can be argued that the category ‘international’ is misleading, even for the modern period, because in focusing on an intra-European international order it neglects patterns of order found elsewhere in the world. The pluralist understanding of international society paints a picture in which states coexist with one another on the basis of international law, but outside Europe the modern order was one in which European states conquered and ruled non-European peoples in the name of ‘civilization’. In their preoccupation with diplomatic equality and the balance of power in Europe, IR theorists have overlooked the unbalanced relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. They assumed that the anarchical pattern is normal and that the imperial pattern is an aberration; in fact, international society displays both (Keene 2002). There was an international element in the competition among European imperial powers for trade and territory, starting with the search for gold and spices in the Indies in the 16th century and ending with the ‘scramble for Africa’ at the end of the 19th. But the idea of empire is a denial of IR, for each empire imagines itself the guardian of a unitary order governed not horizontally by international law but vertically through imperial administration. One might find this argument overstated or not especially novel, but the politics of imperial imagination has nevertheless proven a fruitful area for historical enquiry (Muthu 2014; Pitts 2018). One solution to the category problem in writing the history of international thought is to resist broad generalizations by narrowing the focus to topics that can be securely grounded on historical evidence. Sometimes that focus is achieved by discussing a particular text, such as Kant’s Perpetual Peace, or the writings of a particular thinker, such as Hans Morgenthau or Michael Walzer (Scheuerman 2009; Reiner 2020). It can also be achieved by studying a tradition or attitude, such as English idealism in the first half of the 20th century or American realism in the second. With a well-defined thematic focus, the historian can cover an extended historical period without anachronism: a history of world government or international law from the Greeks to the present is a non-starter, historically speaking, but a history of international legal theory from 1870 to 1960

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(Koskenniemi 2001) or even of confederal ideas in modern Europe (Forsyth 1981) can be successfully carried off. The history of international political thought is being rewritten today from perspectives critical of its Eurocentrism, its racism and its occlusion of women’s voices (Owens 2018). Theorizing international politics is challenging because it is hard to separate theoretical and practical concerns. Theorizing is often distorted by unconscious prejudice or deliberate advocacy. One might think that historians can avoid this fate because they are concerned with pasts that can be recovered but not improved. The danger of partisanship remains, however, because the historian does not passively contemplate a given past but is actively engaged in constructing it. New constructions may mean demolishing old ones: the history of IR, we now understand, is not only about relations between states but also about the rise and fall of empires. It is not only about the powerful but also about those on whom power is exercised, internally as well as externally, in the pursuit of aggrandizement abroad: subject nationalities, indigenous peoples, women, the poor. Decolonizing international political theory is therefore part of the project, whether we see it in moral and political or in historical terms.

Glossary Terms Distributive justice: Justice in distributing goods rather than in respecting rights or punishing wrongs. There is a lively debate about whether the same distributive principles apply across all areas of life or whether different spheres (citizenship, healthcare or public office) require different principles.

Global justice: In contrast to international justice as justice between nations, global justice is justice in respecting rights or distributing goods transnationally. Advocates for global justice speak of justice beyond borders and imagine a world community in which states play a less prominent role.

Global order: In contrast to the idea of international order, which rests on relations between states, the idea of global order suggests other possible arrangements such as empire, federation, regional cooperation or a stateless order based on transnational relations and informal global governance.

Political realism: The view that morality is an illusion or alternatively that it does not apply to international affairs, which realists see as a realm of necessity rather than choice. The first view is sometimes called moral scepticism, the second reason of state or realpolitik.

Further Reading Armstrong, C. (2012) Global Distributive Justice: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Forsyth, M. (1981) Unions of States: The Theory and Practice of Confederation (New York: Holmes and Meier). Hathaway, O.A. and Shapiro, S.J. (2017) The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon and Schuster). Rawls, J. (1999) The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Walzer, M. (2015) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th ed. (New York: Basic Books).

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Index A accountability, 57 Acharya, Amitav, 200 Ackerly, Brooke, 11, 142, 156, 161 Addams, Jane, 4 Adorno, Theodor, 139 African Union (AU)/Organization of African Unity OAU), 207 Agamben, Giorgio, 175 Aggestam, Karin, 147, 152, 157, 158 Akkerman, Marc, 73 Algerian War, 65, 171 Al-Qaeda, 56 Amin, Samir, 72 analytical feminism, 142, 150 anarchy, 19, 22, 23, 30, 34 anarchy problématique, 172–173 anthropocene, 239–242 anti-Black racism, 65 anticolonialism, 64–66 ‘anti-globalization’ movements, 239 anti-imperialism, 63 anti-secular, 56 anti-Western Islamic militancy, 58 anti-Western Islamist terror, 49 Aquinas, Thomas, 249 Arab Spring, 38, 41 Archibugi, Daniele, 136 Arendt, Hannah, 70 argumentative rationality, 137 Ashley, Richard, 165, 180 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, 53 atrocity, 247 9/11 attacks, 56 augmented structural realism, 32 authoritarianism, 158, 194 B balance of power, 79, 81 Bandung Conference, 63, 68 Barnett, Michael, 201 Beardsworth, Richard, 185 behaviouralism, 5 beliefs and values, 191

314

Bieler, A., 106 bigotry, 155 biodiversity loss, 240 bio-environmentalism, 225, 229–233, 243 biopolitics, 176, 186 Bleiker, Roland, 165, 166, 170, 182 Bookchin, M., 235 Border Imperialism, 72 Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), 98 Brincat, Shannon, 138 Bukharin, 107, 108 Bull, Hedley, 77, 78, 84 Burchill, Scott, 12, 36–58 Burke, A., 241 Burkina Faso, 68 Bush administration, 80 Butler, Judith, 176 Butterfield, Herbert, 25 Buzan, Barry, 77, 82 C Campbell, David, 166, 167, 176, 178 capitalism, 61, 107, 109, 118 critique of, 105 economic and social globalization, 104 global social and political relations, 103 national and international reproduction of, 104 capital markets, 57 Capitalocene, 240 Capra, F., 235 care ethics, 157 Carr, E.H., 197 Césaire, Aimé, 62 Chakravorty, Gayatri, 74 Chou, Mark, 165 Christian minorities, 49 Cities for Climate Protection network, 238 ‘civilizational hierarchies,’ 93 Clapp, Jennifer, 225, 233, 236 class conflict, 104

classical approaches, 5 climate change, 45, 89, 93, 160, 224, 240 climate emergency, 89, 93 climate politics, 219 coherence, 13 Cold War bipolar international system, 17 Cold War peace, 31 colonialism, 61, 66, 67, 69, 71, 144 colonial violence, 65, 104 commercial traders, 51 The commons, 243 Communism, 10, 98 community, 139 community religious/cultural group, 153 conflicts, 43, 111 Congress of Vienna, 10 constitutionalism, 43 constructivism, 246 contribution of, 196–197 COVID-19 Pandemic, 195 discontents and limitations, 197–200 foreign policy, 190 social identity, 193 social life, 191 social norms, 192 world politics, 191 contemporary liberal internationalism, 39 cosmopolitan democracy, 136 cosmopolitanism, 82, 253 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 3 counter-hegemonic movements, 114 counter-terrorism, 45 COVID-19, 8, 55, 56, 141, 152 Cox, Robert W., 8, 97, 114, 123, 124, 131–133, 189 Crawford, Neta, 137 crimes against humanity, 49 criminal associations, 82 critical theory, 5, 189–190, 225

Index   315

cultural and political differences, 43 cultural characteristics, 61 cultural differences, 255 cultural differentiation, 83 cultural diversity, 253 cultural orientation, 48 cultural revolt, 91 D Dauvergne, Peter, 225, 233, 236 decision-making, 67 decolonization, 62, 76, 84, 91 deconstruction, 171, 179 deforestation, 106 Deleuze, Gilles, 168, 182 deliberative/discursive democracy, 237, 238 democracy, 40, 194, 257 democratic decision-making, 137 democratic deliberation, 239 democratic peace theory, 41, 42 democratic processes and institutions, 40 dependency, 107–110 Derian, James Der, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 168–170 de-territorialization, 181, 182, 186 de Vattel, Emmeric, 86 Devetak, Richard, 16, 164–186, 188 dialogical cosmopolitanism, 135 Dillon, Mick, 175, 182 diplomacy, 79 diplomatic culture, 84 diplomatic negotiations, 154 discourse ethics, 136–138 discursive democracy, 239 discursive institutionalism, 215 distributive justice, 253, 261 domestic legitimacy, 40 domination, 8 Doyle, M., 40 dualist framing, 106 Dunne, Tim, 77, 81, 88 Duvall, Raymond, 201 E Eckersley, R., 232 ecocentrism, 233 ecological citizenship, 237 ecological degradation, 89 ecological footprints, 230 ecological modernization, 237, 239

economic development, 53 economic globalization, 15, 36, 133, 143, 145, 146 economic inequality, 253, 254 economic interdependency, 45, 46, 58 economic revolt, 91 economics, 1 Edkins, Jenny, 165, 168 egoism, 22 Ekelund, Helena, 217 Elias, Norbert, 94 emancipation, 103, 139 empirical feminism, 142, 144–145 English School, 77 international society, 85–90 power, order and humanity, 82–85 Revolt against the West, 90–93 Enloe, Cynthia, 143, 154, 158 entrapment of politics, 177 environmental debates, 228 environmental degradation, 229, 230, 236, 241 environmental ethics, 233 environmental ideology, 225 environmental multilateralism, 237, 239 environmental politics, 227–228 environmental problems, 230 environmental regulation, 45 environmental security, 227 Environmental Stewardship, 90 epistemology, 18, 122, 127, 158, 169 equality, 22, 40, 97, 103 ethical peace, 186 ethics, 94, 138 ethnicity, 144 Eurocentrism, 68 European Border and Coast Guard Agency (EBCG), 217 European Commission or Council, 211 European Enlightenment, 36 European fascism, 2 European integration, 2, 209, 210 European international society, 91, 191 European Union, 44, 207, 251 event, 186 exclusion, 8 explanatory power, 12 Extinction Rebellion, 224

F feminism, 3, 225, 226 analytical feminism, 150 and gender structures visible, 145–146 deconstructing gender, 159–161 empirical feminism, 144–145 feminist epistemologies, 157–159 foreign policy and war, 147–148 gender bias, 154–156 gender relations, 143 institutions, 146–147 IR levels of analysis, 151–154 and liberalism, 142, 158 #MeToo movement, 143 normative feminism, 156–157 and political economy, 142 and post-colonial theory, 74, 116 and post-structuralism, 150, 164 transnational actors, 149–150 feminist foreign policy, 157–158 feminist institutionalism, 215–216 feminist peace, 157 fetishization, 139 finance markets, 54 financial aristocracy, 98 financial deregulation, 53 financial institutions, 55 financialization, 141 First World War, 142, 168 foreign exchange trading, 54 foreign investment, 53 foreign policy, 39, 67, 71, 81, 89, 144, 174, 190 foreign policymaking, 143 Fosdick, Dorothy, 5 Foucault, Michel, 164, 168 Fox, William T.R., 5 Frankfurt School critical theory, 226 fraternity, 97 freedom, 103 free market, 92 free-market environmentalism, 225 free trade, 43, 44, 53, 192 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 46 functional cooperation, 209 functional differentiation, 23

316  Index G G8, 53 game theory, 45 gender categories, 247 gender dynamics, 143 gendered identities, 155 gendered states, 162 gender equality and inequality, 148, 150, 152, 162 gender identity, 144 gender mainstreaming, 162 gender-sensitive conflict analysis, 162 genealogy, 166, 179 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 211 geopolitical security discourse, 177 geopolitics, 61, 98, 110 George, Jim, 137 Gladstone, 49 global capitalism, 103, 111 global climate change, 89 global environmental politics, 93 global finance and trade, 45 global financial crisis, 10, 18, 55, 98, 141, 146 global interconnectedness, 89 global international society, 78, 92 globalization, 1, 58, 107, 108, 245, 256 global justice, 88, 236, 249–253, 260 global justice community, 255 global legal order, 257 global modernity, 69 global order, 261 global political economy, 1, 141, 144 global political reforms, 237 global politics, 1 global (environmental) politics, 234 Gramsci, Antonio, 111 Great Depression, 10, 18 great power, 34 green ideology, 229 Green State, 243 Grovogui, Siba, 71 Guattari, Felix, 182 Guevara,Che, 66 Guilhot, Nicolas, 5 H Haacke, Jürgen, 138 Haas, Ernst, 209

Habermas, Jürgen, 98, 251 Hall, L., 212 Hardin, Garrett, 226 Havana conference, 66 hegemonic discourse, 190 hegemonic masculinity, 153 hegemonic stability, 201 Hegemony, 111 Held, David, 136 Henderson, Errol, 70 hermeneutic understanding, 18 historical institutionalism, 213–215 historical materialism, 107, 114 Hobbes, Thomas, 22–23, 259 Hobson, John M., 70 homophobia, 155 Honneth, Axel, 138 Horkheimer, Max, 139 human development, 99 humanitarian intervention, 48, 58, 252, 256 humanitarianism, 175 humanitarian responsibility, 253 human rights, 86, 88, 157, 192, 252 in domestic and international politics, 79 and humanitarian intervention, 81 liberalism, 46–49 responsibility to protect, 89 human rights abuses, 253 Huntington, Samuel, 202 Hurrell, Andrew, 77 Hutchison, Emma, 203 I idealism, 2, 79 Ikenberry, John, 213 illiberalism, 158 immanent critique, 139 imperialism, 61, 69, 107–110 independent political communities, 82 Indigenous peoples, 137 individual rights, 40 industrial capitalism, 233 Industrial Revolution, 44, 69 industrial working class, 97 inequality, 8, 216 institutional cooperation, 45 institutional innovation, 224 institutionalism, 15, 225 critiques and overlaps, 220–221

discursive institutionalism, 215 European integration, 209 feminist institutionalism, 215–216 historical institutionalism, 213–215 rational-choice institutionalism, 212–213 role of states and non-state actors, 208 social functions, 209 sociological institutionalism, 213 uses of, 216–219 institutionalized norms, 192, 193 Institutions of International Society, 90 instrumental rationality, 139 intellectual techniques, 7, 9 interdependence, 36, 46, 154 international commerce, 58 international conflict, 142, 152 international cooperation, 61 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 47 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 47 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 47 International Criminal Court (ICC), 47 international criminal law, 79 international institutions, 95–96, 196 international justice, 252 International Labour Organization (ILO), 47 international law, 79 international legitimacy, 89 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 53, 73, 210 international non-governmental organizations, 89 international norms, 195 international political system, 154 international political theory, 94 globalization, 245 global justice, 250–254 individual ethics, 245 international affairs, 245, 246 justice in war, 246–250 political thought, 245 international politics, 105 international principle, 136 international relations, 45, 80 Eurocentrism in, 92

Index   317

liberalism (see liberalism) neo-Gramscianism, 113 post-structuralism and post-colonialism, influence of, 109–110 racialization and racism, 69 realism (see realism) International Relations’ origins and development, 4 international society, 79, 81, 85–90, 93, 95, 258 progress and civilization, 93–95 international system, 23, 69 international thought, 260 international trade, 52 interpretive power, 13 intersectionality, 162 intra-firm trade, 52 J Jackson, T., 86 Jenson, Jane, 219 justice, 80, 253 K Kantian principle, 136 Kant, Immanuel, 40, 70 Kenny, Meryl, 216 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 172 Klein, Bradley, 174 Klotz, Audie, 199 Koga, K., 207 Kratochwil, Fredrich, 211 Krook, Mona Lena, 216 Kuhn, Thomas, 11 Kyoto Protocol, 224 L labour aristocracy, 108 legal-political restrictions, 41 legal revolt, 91 legitimacy, 205 Lenin, 107, 108 liberal capitalism, 37 liberal democracy, 61, 86, 92, 192, 238, 251 liberal egalitarianism, 255 liberal institutionalism, 36, 44 liberal intergovernmentalism, 220 liberalism, 2, 6, 15, 17, 82, 246 contemporary liberal internationalism, 39 financial system and terrorism, 49–50 free market economies, 38

free trade, 51–53 globalization, 49–51 human rights, 46–49 interdependence and liberal institutionalism, 44–46 international behaviour, 39 liberal capitalism, 39 liberal democracy, 37, 39 liberal internationalism, 39 liberal zone of peace, 39 non-state terrorism, 55–57 post-Cold War optimism, 37 prospects for peace, 39–43 sovereignty and foreign investment, 53–55 spirits of war and commerce, 43–44 US Invasion of Iraq, 41 liberty, 97 Lieber, Francis, 3 lifeboat ethics, 230 limits to growth, 243 Linklater, Andrew, 12, 77–118, 200, 225 Lisle, Debbie, 177 Lobell, Stephen, 33 logic of consequences, 213 Lowndes, Vivien, 216 Lynch, Marc, 137 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 168 M Mackay, Fiona, 216 Mahoney, James, 213, 214 Malek, Anouar Abdel, 66 male-masculine identity, 152 Mantle, D., 226 market-based economic relations, 36 market capitalism, 50 market civilization, 86 Marxism, 6, 17 class struggles, nature and international relations, 102–107 feminism and post-colonial theory, 117 geopolitics and war, 111 historical materialist conception of, 99–102 imperialism and dependency, 107–110 international politics, 97 societal development, 112 societal multiplicity influences, 113

uneven and combined development (UCD) approach, 112 world politics, 110 Marx, Karl, 11 materialism, 196 Mattern, Bially, 203 Meadows, D., 234 Medieval Muslim theology, 249 Mediterranean Refugee Crisis, 72 Mérand, Frédéric, 219 #MeToo movement, 143 militarization, 143 military competition, 45 Miller, David, 256 misogyny, 155 Mitrany, David, 208 mode of production, 118 modern European state system, 61 modern international system, 61 modernity, 89 Mohanty, Chandra, 159 morality, 80 moral responsibility, 248, 256 More, Thomas, 78 Morgenthau, Hans, 5, 152, 154, 260 Morton, A., 106 Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), 54 multinational corporations, 82 N national economic sovereignty, 55 nationalism, 69, 104, 107 national liberation, 65 national self-determination, 109, 251 nation-states, 37 Nazi Germany, 111 Neal, Andrew, 176 neocolonialism, 76 neo-Gramscianism/neo-­ Gramscian approaches, 98, 111, 113 neo-liberal institutionalism, 210 neo-liberalism, 188, 189 neoliberal market civilization, 114 neo-mercantilist theory, 52 neo-realism, 2, 15, 81, 188, 189 New Institutionalism, 207 political behaviour and decision-making, 211 political processes, 211 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 5

318  Index Niemann, Arne, 217 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 164 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 82 non-intervention principle, 252 non-state actors, 1 non-state terrorism, 55–57 non-tariff barriers (NTBs), 52 non-violent resistance, 248 non-Western knowledges, 67 normative, 18, 83, 205 normative feminism, 142 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 219 Nyers, Peter, 182 O ontology, 8, 18 ontopology, 186 Ophuls, William, 227 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD), 54 orientalism, 67, 76 Owens, Patricia, 4 P pacific federation, 40 pacifism, 248 passive revolutions, 116 rise of China, 115 Paterson, Matthew, 16 path dependency, 214 peace, 31 Persaud, Randolph B., 71 Pierson, Paul, 213 Pin-Fat, Veronique, 165 pluralist international society, 96 polarity, 24, 34 political accountability, 195 political and economic development, 37 political associations, 103 political community, 84, 94, 136, 175, 182, 238, 254 political culture, 84 political development, 58, 95 political dynamics, 182 political economy, 37, 105 political identity, 177–179, 183 political ideology, 152, 249 political jurisdictions, 104 political leadership, 162 political liberalism, 251 political order, 253 political power, 168

political practices, 177, 180, 232 political prosaics, 182 political realism, 248, 249, 261 political revolt, 91 political rights, 143 political spaces, 177 political structures, 23 political subjectivity, 177, 180, 182 political transformation, 225 political violence, 68 Pollock, Mark, 218 polycentric governance, 238 post 9/11, 71 post-Cold War developments, 136 post-Cold War period liberal democracy, 48 ‘post-colonial donors,’ 93 postcolonial feminism, 74, 76 postcolonialism, 172, 225 anti-Black racism, 65 anticolonial struggles, 66 colonial violence, 65 critics/critiques, 73–75 feminism, 74 geopolitical space, 60 history of modern world system, 62 race and epistemic justice, 67–73 social, economic and political effects, 65 post-Communist era, 41 post-conflict peace, 154 post-sovereign political institutions, 94 post-structuralism, 16, 225, 226 anarchy problématique, 172–173 boundaries, 176–177 deconstruction, 170–172 double reading, 172 genealogy, 165–169 identity, 177–179 post-structuralist ethics, 184–186 power and knowledge, 164–165, 169, 172 sovereign states, 174 sovereignty and ethics of exclusion, 183–184 statecraft, 179–181 textual strategies of, 169–170 violence, 174–176

post-war international relations theory, 5 power-maximization, 201 power politics, 154 power transition, 201 practices, 205 Prague’s Jewish community, 49 Prashad, Vijay, 72, 73 praxis, 18 pre-social, 189 principle of non-intervention, 84 principles of justice, 94, 253 private authority, 257 problem-solving theory, 10, 139–140, 242 pro-gender equality, 158 Prometheanism, 105 protectionism, 51 Prozorov, Sergei, 179 public deliberation, 257 public health, 45 public scrutiny, 136 Putnam, Robert, 220 Q quasi-phenomenology, 174 queer theory, 162 R race, 65, 144 racial revolt, 91 racism, 61, 155 radical decentralization, 231 rational-choice institutionalism, 212–213 realism, 6, 15, 79, 81, 246 augmented structural realism, 31–32 balancing, 25 China, rise of, 21 cooperation and conflict, 24–25 defined, 19–20 explanations, 28–30 Hobbes’ assumptions, 22–23 morality and foreign policy, 27–28 neo-classical realism, 32–33 neo-classical refinements, 26–27 realist ‘theories,’ 28 relative gains, 25–26 self-help, 24 structural realism, 30–31 Waltzian structural realism, 23–24

Index   319

reductionism, 39 reflexivity, 13–14 regimes, 45 regime theory, 210, 221 Reid, Julian, 175 Reinsch, Paul S., 3 religious associations, 82 religious freedom, 252 Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, 238 Reus-Smit, Chris, 16, 77, 81, 85, 90, 94, 131, 188–205 Revolt against the west, 96 rights and duties of individual person, 93 rights of women, 139 Ripsman, Norrin, 33 Rockefeller Foundation, 5 Rosenberg, Justin, 112 Rosow, Stephen, 137 Ruggie, John, 211 rule of law, 40, 43, 252, 257 Russett, B., 40 S Said, Edward, 65, 66, 68 Sajed, Alina, 15, 60–76, 172 Sankara, Thomas, 68 Saramago, André, 97–118 scepticism, 51, 94 Schmidt, Brian, 2 Schmitt, Carl, 175 Schweller, Randall, 26 Second World War, 5, 10 secular democracies, 42 security, 155 security communities, 203 security discourses, 155 self-defence, 41 self-fulfilling prophecy, 154 self-help, 35 self-interest, 24, 61, 81 self-preservation, 259 self-reflection, 12 11 September 2001 (9/11) event, 17, 141, 167 settler-colonialism, 74 sexism, 61 sexual equality, 156 sexuality, 144 Shapiro, Michael, 185 Shilliam, Robbie, 68 Single European Act, 211 Sjoberg, Laura, 152 Smith, Adam, 70 social agency, 198

social analysis, 236 social and cultural norms, 236 social bonds,135, 138 social change, 7 social classes, 97 social construction, 159 social contract, 61 social development, 102 social ecology, 225 social environment, 189, 193 social epistemes, 195 social forces, 154 social greens, 243 social identities, 191, 192, 194, 200 social institutions, 99, 210 social interactions, 189, 204 social intercourse, 100, 101 socialism, 82, 110 socialization, 154 social justice, 246 social movements, 89 social norm, 136 social organization, 87 social practice, 203 social reproduction, 159 social structures, 202 social systems, 233 societal analysis, 196 societal development, 112 sociological institutionalism, 213, 221 Solidarism, 96 sovereign authority, 252 sovereign equality, 84 sovereign governments, 88 sovereign power, 37 sovereign subjectivity, 180 sovereignty, 48, 79, 184, 196, 252 Spretnak, C., 235 standard of civilization, 87, 96 state of nature, 35 state sovereignty, 83, 176, 182 strategic domain, 192 strategic security discourses, 142 strategic violence, 175 structuration, 205 Suez Crisis, 64 Suganami, Hidemi, 9 Sun Tzu, 1 supranational institutions, 209, 254, 257 sustainability, 147, 149, 223, 225, 230, 236, 238, 241, 243 systemic constructivism, 194

T Taliaferro, Jeffrey, 33 territorial control, 45 territorial integrity, 252 terrorism, 194 textuality, 170, 186 Thelen, Kathleen, 213, 214 Third World Marxism, 108, 110 Third World national liberation movements, 109 Thirty Years War, 168 Thomson, Jennifer, 219 Tickner, J.A., 2, 3, 22, 144, 152–154 totalization, 186 Towns, Ann, 152 trade and commerce, 142 trade regimes, 154 transaction costs, 217 transcultural values, 89 transnational corporations (TNCs), 51 transnational democracy, 238 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 54 Treaty of Berlin, 49 Treaty of Kucuk-Kainardji, 49 Tricontinental Conference, 63, 66, 68 Trotsky, Leon, 112 True, Jacqui, 141–162 Trump, Donald, 203 Tuathail, Gearóid Ó., 170 U unequal gender relations, 153 uneven and combined development (UCD), 112, 118 unintended consequences, 222 United Nations, 208 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 241 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 64 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 224 United Nations Security Council Resolutions, 157 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), 53 unit-level constructivism, 194, 195

320  Index Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 47 universal human rights, 58 US foreign policy, 42 utopianism, 81 V Vaughan-Williams, Nick, 176 Vietnam War, 65, 245 Vincent, John, 47, 77, 82 violence, 69, 79, 84, 105, 174–176 of colonialism, 65 in modern politics, 175 political violence, 68 Vitalis, Robert, 3, 69 Vucetic, Srdjan, 70, 71 W Walker, Rob, 177

Waltz, Kenneth, 9, 23–24, 97, 152 Walzer, Michael, 260 War, Algerian, 171 war crimes, 49 Watson, Adam, 77, 84 Waylen, Georgina, 216 weapons of mass destruction (WMD), 56 weapons proliferation, 93 Weber, Martin, 138 Weber, Max, 226, 235 Wendt, Alexander, 192 Western Europe, 112 Western values, 88, 89 Wheeler, Nicholas, 77, 86, 88 Wight, Martin, 77, 97 Wilcox, L., 159 Williams, Michael, 5 Wilson, Woodrow, 70

Wissenburg, M., 242 Wolfers, Arnold, 5 women’s activism on democracy and international institutions, 3 on peace, 3 women’s rights, 68, 156 women’s security, 157 Woolf, Leonard, 208 world affairs, 1 World Bank, 53, 73, 210, 211 world politics, 1, 94, 108, 110, 111, 191, 194, 200, 202 world society, 83, 95 world-systems analysis, 110 World Trade Organization (WTO), 53, 211 Y Young, Robert, 66