In a classic 1966 paper, Martin Wight lamented the absence of sustained and systematic ‘International Theory’ (IT) that would be ‘the twin of speculation about the state to which the name “political theory” is appropriated.’Footnote 1 Although today ‘political theory’ is commonly reserved to designate purely normative as opposed to positive and legal theory, ‘Why is There No International Theory?’ did not distinguish sharply between these different types of theory and so its lament was quite general, pertaining to IT of any kind. In contrast to the deep tradition of political thought on the internal affairs of states, on the international side we have only minor figures and the ‘parerga’ – subsidiary works – of great ones, which have cumulated little over time. As Wight summed up the situation then: ‘International theory, or what there is of it, is scattered, unsystematic, and mostly inaccessible to the layman’.Footnote 2
Wight attributed this lack of scholarly reflection to two principal causes. One was the ‘intellectual prejudices imposed by the sovereign state’, which have directed political theorists’ attention inward, away from the state’s external context, and made them normatively suspicious of politics and governance beyond the nation state, and of a world state in particular. The other was the widely shared belief that international politics is a world of inevitably recurring conflict and war, and as such is ‘less susceptible of a progressivist interpretation’ than domestic politics. With questions about the good life thereby off the table, IT was limited to discussions of survival.
Forty years on, things have certainly changed, both in world politics and in the academy. In the real world we have seen not just the end of the Cold War with its Hobbesian politics, but a decreasing incidence of inter-state war more generally. A ‘democratic peace’ has taken hold in large parts of the world, and where traditional geopolitical conflicts persist, both regional and global security institutions help mitigate their consequences. Indeed, today war is far more common within than between states. Beyond this important change in the security sphere, moreover, rapid technological change has enabled a dramatic intensification in the depth and breadth of interactions between what used to be relatively autarkic societies. Not only has globalization produced massive changes in the international economy, it has also spurred the development of an incipient global civil society as well as an increase in international legalization and institutionalization. All this has generated unprecedented perceptions of common fate beyond the nation-state, such that the very category of ‘the international’ is itself contested; multiple alternative discourses, including transnational and global community, have arisen to theorize how people organize their lives.
Whether these changes should be given a ‘progressivist interpretation’ may of course be debated. The decline of inter-state war might be simply a temporary, pacific phase before a return to eternal conflict; it might even be a mixed blessing if it leads to new, cosmopolitan wars designed to ‘keep’ the peace. The consequences of globalization are similarly uneven, with many distributional losers and an increasingly despoiled global environment. But these changes nevertheless challenge the core empirical claim of IT skeptics, namely that international politics is and will always be a realm of necessity. For the moment at least, there seems to be much more to talk about than mere survival – or if it is survival, then it is increasingly global survival, not just the survival of the individual nation-state.
These changes in world politics have been paralleled by scholarly developments, in at least three different intellectual communities.
Political theorists and philosophers have lately shed some of their ‘intellectual prejudice’ in favor of domestic politics, moving increasingly into the normative aspects not just of traditional inter-state politics, but of transnational and global politics as well. These normative concerns were long present among scholars in the English School,Footnote 3 of which Wight himself was a founder, but in North America we did not see much movement of political theorists in this direction until the publication in 1977 of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars and in 1979 of Charles Beitz’ Political Theory and International Relations, and then extensive work in the 1980s on the ethics of nuclear deterrence. However, by the 1990s that trickle of scholarship had become a steady stream on a wide range of topics, with renewed interest in Just War Theory and its application to the War on Terror, humanitarian intervention, and civil wars; the distributional consequences of global economic and political structures; the political theory of sovereignty; transnational and global citizenship; the democratic deficits of international institutions; the political theory of European integration; the ethics of immigration policy; collective responsibility; global environmental philosophy; and the history of international thought – among others. While International Political Theory (IPT) ranges widely in both questions and approaches, it shares a common concern for theorizing the role of norms and values at the international level and for engaging concepts such as justice, rights and duties that have traditionally been considered the exclusive domain of the domestic.Footnote 4
If IPT has been the subject of a steady stream of scholarship from political theorists and philosophers, there is now a virtual torrent of theory from International Relations (IR) scholars. In contrast to the explicitly normative concerns of those engaged in IPT, in IR the main issues have always been positive ones of explanation and understanding. Although IR traces its antecedents back to Thucydides and can claim a few important past theorists such as Carr and Morgenthau, ‘IR theory’ only became the central focus of the field with the publication of two landmark books in the 1970s that set in motion two competing traditions in the American IR academy: Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), which refounded realism on a positivistic foundation, and Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s Power and Interdependence (Reference Keohane and Nye1977), which revived the liberal concern with interdependence, the possibility of cooperation and the role of international institutions in promoting better outcomes.Footnote 5 Developments within and between these approaches inaugurated a significant turn in IR toward the use of rational choice and game theory to study international politics, and sparked not only an intense internal debate between what became known as neo-realists and neo-liberals, but also a diverse extra-paradigmatic reaction – coming in part from Europe – in the form of feminist, post-structuralist, interpretivist, critical, and various so-called constructivist IR theories. These latter approaches emphasized the importance of social forces and ideas in addition to the predominantly material variables of both realism and liberalism; they introduced explicitly normative concepts such as appropriateness and legitimacy as affecting international outcomes; and they emphasized the role of scholars not merely as observers of world politics but as critics and, through ideas, even shapers of international outcomes. As a result of these multi-faceted and continuing developments, compared to the barren theoretical landscape of Wight’s day, IR is today, if anything, over-supplied with theories of every conceivable variety. While this has made for some confusion, it has ensured that the level of theoretical sophistication within IR is much higher than it was four decades ago. There are now sustained conversations on a broad range of topics, from epistemology to ontology, methodology, and, not least, the realities of world politics.
And then there is a third wave of theory coming out of International Law (IL). Although theoretical reflection on IL goes back to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel, there has been a marked resurgence in international legal theory, as prospects for IL being taken seriously by states have brightened with the end of the Cold War. Old institutions such as the United Nations have been reinvigorated, new institutions such as the WTO and ICC established, and the rise of interdependence has led to greatly expanded attention to private IL and to questions concerning the interface of international and domestic law. Some of the ensuing theoretical developments were a result of importing new ideas from outside, like rational choice models from IR or arguments from feminist theory; others emerged more organically from the efforts of international lawyers to come to grips with the new global order. Regardless, the effect has been a robust and diverse theoretical conversation around a variety of legal topics, including, for example, Just War Theory (again) in an age of humanitarian interventions and preventive war, the growing standing of individuals and non-state actors in the international legal order, the rise of international criminal justice, post-colonial critiques of IL, and global constitutionalism, among others.
In short, there has been more IT in the four decades since Wight’s essay than in the four centuries before. Moreover, this interest in theory has come from a wide range of different traditions and has taken root in at least three distinct disciplinary communities – IPT, IR, and ILFootnote 6 – suggesting that IT is here to stay and will remain intellectually diverse.
So what’s the problem?
If we are correct that IT has arrived, what is the problem? In brief, it is that different theoretical communities are not engaging each other in ways that could be mutually productive. IT aims to foster such a dialog among IPT, IR, and IL.
Even within disciplines, closely related perspectives such as neorealism and neoliberalism often speak past one another; that certainly has been true of more radically different positions such as rationalism and post-structuralism. To be sure, theories sometimes are incompatible in whole or in part – although that still does not mean they cannot speak to each other at least by raising critiques of, and insofar as they share common empirical ground, posing substantive challenges to one another. In some cases, the differences can be attenuated, even if not overcome. At a minimum, challenges can be used to spur better theory in the other. A clear example is provided by the rationalist–constructivist ‘debate’ in IR, some aspects of which dissolve upon a closer inspection.Footnote 7 Constructivists have incorporated some of the strategic logics of rationalism while rationalists have enriched their understanding of beliefs to capture some constructivist concerns. This does not mean the theories have merged or do not retain differences, but engagement can eliminate false differences and encourage cross-fertilization that strengthens both. Even where epistemological or ontological differences are too great, a better appreciation of the horizon and limits of their own arguments – and the possible virtues of others’ arguments – is a valuable step forward for each community.
In contrast to the at least sporadic trade (and warfare) between theoretical approaches that takes place within the discipline-defined boundaries of IT, serious engagement across disciplines is almost non-existent. Thus, instead of one set of conversations around an international issue among normative, positive, and legal theorists, there are three separate sets of conversations going on, each within its own, relatively self-contained, disciplinary ‘silo’. These silos constitute the primary universe of discourse about the international for their members, defining expectations both professionally (in the sense of the prominence of journals and presses and thus the incentive structure for publication), and intellectually in the sense of what constitutes good work or ‘the literature’ in a given domain (i.e., even if good work outside the silo bears on the problem).
To be sure, the silo metaphor may reify what is on the ground a more fluid intellectual situation, and as such we do not want to over-state the impermeability of the boundaries between IPT, IR, and IL. At the level of individual scholars, there is quite a bit of interchange at these boundaries, and this contact may sometimes lead to a genuine movement across them, whether in the form of extensive reading outside one’s field or publishing an article in another field’s journal. Moreover, at an institutional level there have been halting but persistent efforts to promote inter-disciplinarity in the study of the international, particularly between IR and IL.Footnote 8 While these exchanges were initially one-sided, from IR to IL, IR scholars are becoming increasingly interested in IL for its own sake, and as such a genuinely inter-disciplinary conversation may yet evolve.
But if there is some fluidity across the boundaries separating international theorizing in IPT, IR, and IL, significant intellectual impediments remain. This is evident in citation patterns that continue to be heavily weighted toward work in one’s home discipline, and for all the efforts to build inter-disciplinarity between IR and IL, even its proponents will probably agree that not much has changed. But the isolation of disciplinary silos is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the fact that each has its own preferred journal outlets for IT, which might not be read at all by those outside. (How many IR theorists, for example, read – or even know – the Leiden Journal of International Law, or even the European Journal – of International Law, not Relations – both prominent outlets for international legal theory?). Conversely, there is no journal dedicated solely to bringing normative, positive, and legal IT together; the only places where such work currently meets is in generalist political science journals like the American Political Science Review or International Studies Quarterly, which have many other demands on their space (and do not publish IL in any case).
Still, it may be objected that, by virtue of the questions they pose, normative, positive, and legal IT are essentially different, and as such it is perfectly natural, even desirable, for them to constitute distinct intellectual communities. Moreover, the contemporary vitality of IT is arguably rooted precisely in its disciplinary fragmentation. So doesn’t it make sense for there to be a disciplinary division of labor? Would ‘the field’ really be better off if there were just one conversation?
While we do not imagine that the diversity of IT can be reduced to a single conversation, or that this is even a desirable goal, there is nevertheless something important for these fields to talk about: the areas where their concerns overlap. These take two forms, one internal to IT itself and one external in its relationship to the real world.
First, internally, while normative, positive and legal IT are perhaps essentially different at their core, their boundaries are necessarily fuzzy. Is good normative theory possible without taking into account empirical regularities like the democratic peace? Or is good positive theory possible without taking into account the normative force of IL? Or is good legal theory possible without taking into account tensions between morality and interests? In each of these cases, the answer is sometimes, but sometimes not. By engaging such questions, we seek to open up inquiry into the relations and interdependencies among these seemingly different areas.
Second, externally, many – perhaps most – of the real world problems in which students of IT are interested have simultaneously normative, empirical, and legal aspects. A good example is the design of legitimate and effective institutions, a problem of immense practical importance (and evident difficulty) that has received attention in all three of our communities.Footnote 9 While it makes sense for each community to foreground those aspects of the design problem that are its special concern, the design problem itself, concretely, involves not just identifying the constraints of what is possible, but also ethically and legally justifying particular choices within those constraints. So from the standpoint of policymakers (and their critics), all three kinds of knowledge are needed, not just one. Insofar as our three communities hope to enlighten practice in the real world, therefore, it behooves them to think through how the kind of knowledge they produce is related to the kinds produced elsewhere.Footnote 10
On the role and scope of International Theory
All of which brings us to what we believe is a needed role for IT: providing a common forum for international normative, positive, and legal theory. In doing so, IT seeks to encompass both the diversity and the unity of theoretical scholarship on the international. The diversity, in the sense that IT seeks to publish the best theory within each of our three disciplinary communities taken on their own terms; but also the unity, in the sense that IT is particularly interested in work that cuts across or otherwise engages two or even all three communities simultaneously, whether in an integrative or in a critical way. We hope that both kinds of articles will be of interest to all our readers – the former because IT will provide ‘one stop shopping’ where readers outside the immediate community can learn about relevant developments in other fields; and the latter because such broad gauge articles will begin to create a common core of ‘IT’ for all of us. In all cases, we will press authors to make their arguments accessible to as wide an audience as possible and resist efforts that use specialized language in an exclusionary way.
While the scope of IT is deliberately broad, however, in three respects it is bounded. First, although not in its title, IT is concerned first and foremost with ‘politics’. What precisely ‘politics’ means is of course contested, perhaps essentially so. Our own intuitions run toward something like the ‘mobilization, structure, deployment, and/or legitimation of public power’. By this criterion, IT would not, for example, publish a work of pure international trade theory whose concern was entirely in the private sphere and did not engage its political implications; yet, it would publish an economic analysis of how institutions affect bargaining outcomes in international trade, or a critique of the global property relations that enable trade to be ‘international’, or a normative inquiry into the distributional consequences of free trade. Similarly, an article that analyzed the role of culture in global civil society would be of interest insofar as it connected culture to political questions such as governance and control. Still, we do not want to stipulate ex ante what this boundary looks like in practice, so suffice it to say that we mean politics ‘broadly defined’. Therefore, IT welcomes submissions not only from political scientists but equally from philosophers, lawyers, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and whomever else as long as they engage the political.
A second focus of IT is ‘the international’. This term is contested in a different sense than ‘politics’, insofar as it is seen by some as privileging state-centric scholarship and thereby marginalizing ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘regional’ politics, in which international organizations or non-state actors may be the main protagonists. We take this concern seriously, and were there a better term to convey the journal’s scope in this respect we would choose it. However, for better or worse ‘international’ is part of the identity of IPT, IR, and IL, and as such it seems useful to adopt it, while treating it as broadly as possible. So, consider as a working definition of ‘international’ as ‘anything involving interactions across or beyond the boundaries of sovereign states’. While in a sense state-centric, this is actually agnostic with respect to the actors or processes involved, and would include constitutive challenges to the sovereignty regime from global, transnational, and regional phenomena. Moreover, while this definition of ‘international’ is substantive in nature, we are also open to work that engages key analytic properties related to international problems, such as ‘phenomena that do not take place in the shadow of centralized power’. Taking these two definitions together, IT would exclude work dealing solely with domestic politics conventionally understood, but be open, for example, to a study of foreign policy decision-making that addresses issues across borders, as well as to a study of civil wars that share the logic of anarchy of many international problems.
The final requirement is that work published in IT must constitute original contributions to ‘theory’. Like ‘politics’ and ‘international’, ‘theory’ too is contested, and so again our approach is intended to be inclusive. Formal or qualitative theory, empirical theory, social theory, legal and normative theory, conceptual analysis, philosophical reflection on the epistemology, ontology, or methodology of IT, practical ethics, history of international political thought, and no doubt others – each, in all their varieties – rationalist, realist, constructivist, liberal, post-structural, feminist, post-colonial, cosmopolitan, communitarian, critical, and whatever else – we take to be part of IT. The boundary here is constituted less by the type of theory than by the emphasis on an original contribution: manuscripts will be judged by the extent to which they add new theory rather than by the extent to which they test old theory. One of IT’s primary objectives is to create space – in both the intellectual sense and in the literal one of journal pages – for authors to develop theoretical concepts and arguments in depth without requiring an attendant empirical analysis. Of course, this is not to diminish the importance of testing or otherwise evaluating theory empirically; rather, our belief is that with the inter-disciplinary expansion of IT in recent years, there is now also a place for a journal dedicated to advancing this conversation further. And sometimes that can be done empirically – for example, by highlighting the normative challenges posed by certain empirical facts,Footnote 11 or the tensions between ethical and legal imperatives in concrete cases.Footnote 12 So in requiring papers to contribute to theory, we do not discourage authors from bringing empirical considerations to bear on their arguments; indeed, we welcome such considerations, not least because they will increase the accessibility of articles to a very diverse, inter-disciplinary audience. The point is only that these empirics should serve to develop new theory, not just assess an existing theory’s fit with the world.
Creating an International Theory community
Above all, the goal of IT is to generate a dialog among different types of theories, since it is only through such a dialog that the boundaries and relationships between theories, and thus their respective strengths and weaknesses, can be properly assessed. The breadth we aspire to is reflected in our Editorial Board, which is roughly tripartite in structure, representing the three broad areas of IR, IPT, and IL. We have also sought similar diversity in the theoretical approaches that members of our Board engage. (For a complete listing of Board members, as well as the opportunity to sign up for contents alerts, please see our website at www.journals.cambridge.org/IT.) Thus, while not every conceivable IT audience is represented, this Board gives us a capacity to review and pursue a range of articles that we could not possibly manage on our own. And we hope it signals the broad range of scholarship that we seek to include.
One thing we quickly realized in assembling this diverse board, however, is that it will be very difficult to ever bring them together for a fully representative board meeting. There is no single professional association or conference that encompasses a full cross-section of our Board. Fortunately, the electronic age makes it possible for a virtual Board to be an effective one – and so far we have been pleased with their responsiveness when called upon for guidance. We hope that the journal will be a vehicle that helps create a sense of community among the broad range of scholars that they represent.
Of course, communication is inherently difficult across such a diverse community. Every subgroup has its own specialized language and particular frames of reference that facilitate its internal interaction and advancement. But these can also become jargonistic and self-referential in ways that make it difficult for outsiders to understand what is going on. IT hopes to find a middle ground between these advantages and disadvantages. While we will certainly publish articles that fall squarely within one subgroup, we will press authors to use their technical apparatus as sparingly as possible and, especially, to develop key parts of their intuitions and arguments in relatively accessible language. Moreover, we will require individual articles to be self-conscious about the horizons of their perspective, to be aware of the limits of their assumptions and hidden presumptions, and to be clearly written. In the end, there are few ideas so profound that they cannot be communicated in ordinary language, and so we will press authors to do so – whether they are working with mathematics in formal theory or continental social theory in post-structuralism – even if they ultimately have to move into more specialized language to fully complete their argument.
Nuts and bolts
Many of the operational details of IT are standard and details on submitting manuscripts are posted on our CUP website. Nevertheless, it may be useful to reiterate some key points here and especially to point out some novel features of our intended editorial practice, which will continue to evolve as we learn.
Because IT wants to make space for sustained theoretical development, we will accept articles of up to 15,000 words for review, although in most cases we will expect the final version to be under 12,000 words after the advice of reviewers is incorporated. That said, we are very interested in shorter articles and in some sense will favor them for the obvious reason that they allow us to publish more pieces.
We will also consider a variety of other formats in addition to traditional articles. For example, we are currently working with a group of scholars organizing a symposium on a topic relevant to IT, which will consist of a series of shorter papers interacting with each other around a common topic. We are working with a different group organizing a symposium on a recent important book. Here the format is to ask the author to briefly summarize the book and then invite commentators from different perspectives to critique it, with a brief response by the author. Our expectation is that such symposia will introduce out-of-area ideas to a portion of our readers who might not normally engage them, while offering a different perspective to those who are familiar with the topic. Finally, while we will not publish book reviews, we are open to review essays that use several books as a springboard to develop a theoretical argument.
All articles will be peer-reviewed using a double-blind procedure. This will be standard for many of our contributors but not for legal scholars used to publishing in law journals which have their own, very different procedures. Blind reviewing helps to ensure that we get the most forthright and reliable reviews not clouded by other considerations, or appearing to be so. Our goal is to process articles from their receipt to an initial decision within two months; our commitment is to do so within 3 months. Of course, this depends not only on our own efficiency in sending manuscripts out to reviewers but on their diligence in getting back to us in a timely fashion. So we will miss our mark on occasion but our initial experience suggests that we can largely maintain this standard.
One of our goals is to use the review process to improve articles both on their own terms and in the extent to which they engage other communities or traditions. To this end, in addition to ‘insider’ reviews by scholars who know a manuscript’s area very well, we will generally seek ‘outsider’ reviews from scholars who are not part of that immediate intellectual community but have relevant expertise. We intend to allow neither insiders to overly promote their fellow travelers nor outsiders to veto articles, and will seek a balance which engages both audiences (perhaps in a contested way). So far our experience with reviewers has been superlative. In addition to being generally timely with their reviews, they have analyzed the articles submitted carefully and sometimes in great detail. Indeed, the author of one of the papers in this first volume notes that he received over 20 pages of helpful comments in the course of submitting and revising his paper for publication. Such high-quality reviews will help make the journal a success and are perhaps an early indicator of the interest in and strength of the community of scholars we are seeking to catalyze.
Since one of the primary goals of IT is to promote a community of scholars and interactions among them, we also want the review process to be one not just of evaluation but also, in some cases, of discovery. Whereas the standard alternatives available to editors are ‘Accept’ (usually with required revisions), ‘Revise and Resubmit’ (with a reasonable prospect, but no guarantee, of publication after a subsequent review) or ‘Reject’ (with no prospect of reconsideration), we have inserted a fourth option between the last two which we informally call ‘D&D’ (for ‘dialog and deliberation’). We came up with this idea in reviewing several articles where we and the reviewers felt the author was on to something worth pursuing, but where the central question was ill-defined or the answer seriously incomplete. The resulting uncertainty left us unwilling to offer the author an ‘R&R’ with its implication that satisfactory revisions will lead to publication, since we did not have a clear sense whether such revisions were feasible. Instead, in a D&D we invite the author to respond to the reviews by developing a two to three page plan for how the paper could be revised in a way that would meet the objections. We then evaluate this plan (sometimes in consultation with the reviewers) as a basis for inviting the author to R&R, or not inviting if we still do not see a viable route to eventual publication in IT. We already have several such papers in process and are pleased at the prospect of ultimately publishing work that would otherwise have been rejected at the first stage. Since this is a labor-intensive process – both for us and for the reviewers – we are uncertain whether we can sustain it indefinitely. As long as we can, however, we plan to use D&D as a means to build and improve the range and quality of articles we publish.
We are committed to transparency at IT. At each stage of the review process we will share our decisions not only with authors but also with reviewers (in an appropriately anonymized fashion). We are prepared to overrule the reviewers and certainly to make hard calls when reviewers are divided. But transparency holds us accountable to them as well as to the author. Moreover, transparency allows for useful learning by the reviewers who see how others evaluated the same article and how we as editors dealt with their sometimes conflicting advice. We also hope to learn by encouraging feedback from all concerned that will point out mistakes we make and help us improve our procedures.
A final welcome to International Theory
We conclude by inviting you to join us in the IT enterprise. However much and creatively we work with authors to get their papers into publishable form, in the end this journal can succeed only if we receive enough high-quality submissions. So please send your best work to us for consideration, and encourage your students and colleagues to do so as well. Although there is not yet a single trans-disciplinary community of scholars devoted to IT, our hope is that by building IT our readership will come to constitute such a community – which is not to say a homogeneous one in complete agreement but, rather, one within which fruitful discussion, debate and learning is possible across different theoretical perspectives.
Acknowledgements
We thank Kenneth Abbott, Toni Erskine, Jennifer Mitzen, Andrew Moravcsik, John Oates, Chris Reus-Smit, David Welch and Michael Williams for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
