Intra-elite, state-centric society is a strategic front, and ought to be defended and put to use in the continued development of a global and decolonial turn in IR.
A reckoning with the traditional diplomatic community
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Theory & Methods
Get off my lawn! Are journal demands for “novelty” creating a culture of low-level academic dishonesty?
A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
Indeterminacy, Uncertain Contexts and the Dual Nature of Norms
When it comes norm dynamics and how we theorize them, uncertainty presents something of a paradox. We study norms because we think that they matter. But if norms are inherently uncertain, then how is it possible that they constitute, constrain, and otherwise shape the behavior of global actors? Unless norms produce stable and defined expectations, then how can they have the power to structure international politics?
Autonomous Weapons Systems: Uncertainty and Anticipatory Norm-building
Since 2014 the international community has considered the issue of autonomy in weapons systems under the framework of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)....
More Theory & Methods Posts
From “Wilsonian” to “Rooseveltian” Liberalism
Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry recently published a ‘big think’ article in Foreign Policy. They note that the Biden administration’s approach to foreign and domestic policy – including its particular understanding of the relationship between them – is best understood as “Rooseveltian” in character. What should we make of this?
A Gilded Age of Social Science: Big Data Governance, Neopositivist Social Science and Covid-19
As an American living in London, I wake up every morning and check statistics: the number of positive cases reported the prior day in both the UK and US, the number of deaths, hospitalizations and vaccine doses administered, the percentage of the population fully vaccinated and the number of days until the government promises to re-evaluate the lockdown’s end. These numbers determine when I might see my family again, when I might receive a vaccine or even when I might be able to meet a friend for a much-needed outdoor pint. Of course, beneath these numbers may lie unspeakable loss to...
Elite Experiments: Strengthening Scholarship while Bridging the Gap
This post was written by Simone Dietrich, Heidi Hardt and Haley J. Swedlund. Simone Dietrich is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva. Heidi Hardt is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine; a member of the 2015 International Policy Summer Institute cohort, and a 2021 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. Haley Swedlund is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Radboud University and a member of the...
Confronting Biases in Policy-Engaged Research: The Case of NATO and Russia
Academic debates about NATO-Russian relations are deeply entangled with policy preferences.
Is “Camp Qual” really our best option?
This is a guest response to Simon Frankel Pratt's musing on methods. Lucas Dolan is a PhD Candidate at American University's School of International Service. In a recent contribution, Simon Frankel Pratt offers an incisive conceptual dismantling of the quantitative v. qualitative dichotomy in social science research. Pratt points out that while “quantitative’ refers to a clear community of practice centered around statistically facilitated inductive causal inference, “qualitative” lumps together several distinctive research communities. Though not all named in the post, this implicitly...
Theories Never Die
Having been invited to offer an ‘overall response’ to this special issue, I decided to take a look at how the contributors deal with the editors’ claim that we are witnessing the end of ‘IR Theory’. But let me preface this with an observation. The EJIR editors’ decision to compile this special issue, taken at the 2011 ISA conference in Montreal, occurred parallel to the creation of the ISA Theory Section (in which I was closely involved). While this was not a consciously coordinated effort, neither was it a coincidence. Both initiatives were motivated by a similar concern, namely a...
Not Aufklärers but Dilettantes: Reading Michael C. Williams’s “In the Beginning…”
“In the Beginning” joins a growing literature – including my own Recovering International Relations – in which normative claims regarding the vocation of IR theory are tied to an historical account of its disciplinary emergence.* If these arguments vary in their details, they share a common logical-rhetorical tactic. An account of the discipline’s beginnings is mobilized to critique present-day scholarly practices: to spur “reflection on where one is, and where one is going.” On Williams’ account, a basic confusion regarding IR-realism’s relationship to liberalism characterizes “where...
The International Relations Enlightenment and the Ends of International Relations Theory
From its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project.