The ‘relational turn’ in International Studies offers an important opportunity for the field to move beyond Eurocentric conceptions of relationality in the study of international politics. But pluralizing sources for relational thinking requires practical negotiation of epistemic, ontological, and cosmological differences for which the field remains poorly equipped. To address the methodological needs around navigating relational differences, this article rereads the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein alongside key insights from decolonial theory to provide a conceptual and practical bridge between Westernized approaches to International Studies and the diverse relationalities at play in non-Westernized ways of knowing and being. Scholars of International Studies and decolonial theory highlight Wittgenstein’s utility for deconstructing epistemic and ontological Eurocentrism. However, this article introduces for the first time the important practical, epistemic, and ethical consonances between Wittgenstein’s method of dialogical comparison and decolonial practices of pluriversal dialogue around specific ‘connectors’, seemingly cognate concepts whose irreducible plurality of meaning provides grounds for contingent practices of pluriversal encounter. Through its family resemblances to pluriversal dialogue, Wittgenstein’s method re-envisions the field’s key concepts as sites for discursive encounter across epistemic, ontological, and cosmological differences, opening possibilities for engagement with correspondingly diverse modes of relationality.

In this article, we show how IR’s central debate about international anarchy emerged from controversies over war, evolution and Darwinism that took place around 1900. It was a chiefly European debate between apologists of war – polemically called ‘Social Darwinists’ – and proponents of a ‘scientific pacifism,’ in particular the sociologist Jacques Novicow and the peace activist Alfred H. Fried. Apologists of war cited theories of evolution to portray international politics as an agonistic struggle among states, civilizations or races. Arguing from that premise, they naturalized political violence and imperialism. Scientific pacifists cited theories of evolution to show that anarchy was malleable and could be overcome through international organization. In their view, evolution rewarded cooperation of humankind in its struggle against the forces of nature. Ever since, evolutionary theorizing has returned to IR debates. Most defining, as we argue, has been the controversy between Kenneth N. Waltz and Alexander Wendt over the consequences of international anarchy. It was equally a debate about the right interpretation of what evolution implies for international politics. We conclude that evolutionary theory has been a lifetime companion of disciplinary IR, intimately related to the anarchy theme.

States spy. Yet International Relations (IR) theory has no systematic account of intelligence. I make three arguments. First, realist IR theories are too narrow to theorize intelligence as the complex social practice it is. Realism renders intelligence invisible or reduces it to a single instrumental raison d’état logic. Second, the English School’s societal approach opens the way for theorizing intelligence as instrument of normative practice. Extending Adam Watson’s raison de système to intelligence, grounded in the intelligence–diplomacy relationship and corroborated by an emerging lex specialis, establishes that intelligence helps constitute international society rather than merely operating within it. Third, the societal approach does not exhaust the subject. Raison d’humanité names a third logic – intelligence in the service of justice – and critical approaches deepen the account by asking whose survival, whose order, and whose humanity the framework serves. The three logics are in permanent tension and tend toward a rough hierarchy, reflecting political choice rather than structural necessity. This analysis raises a question for future research: whether intelligence qualifies as a primary institution of international society – a practice whose place is not at the margins of world politics but at its center. Where there are spies, there is society.

While much work has been done on ontological security relating to the state’s sense of self, whether addressing the role of migration, globalisation, and even membership to supranational entities like the European Union, scholars have explored less how creating ontological security could be an unexpected outcome in responding to anxiety around shared environmental spaces. In this paper, we conceptualise an ‘ontological insecurity community’ – where groups of states that surround transboundary environmental spaces are bound together by a shared anxiety driven by environmental change. This shared anxiety around environmental change counter-intuitively may create ontological security in how states form an ontological insecurity community. We suggest that unpacking transboundary spaces provides particular lessons for better understanding environmental change through the lens of ontological security and the place of transboundary spaces for state anxiety. In this paper, we draw upon existing work on eco-anxiety to theorise how this concept can be applied to ontological security and provide two illustrative case studies of the Amazon and the Arctic. Our work expands ontological security by asking how environmental change may creatively mobilise states from insecure to secure beings through community formation.

This article recovers the international thought of Merze Tate, the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in government from Harvard’s Radcliffe College. I reconstruct Tate’s classical realist approach and show how she applies it to the causes of disarmament failure and views race war as a challenge to global racial hierarchy. Tate’s realist approach highlights an alternative approach to racism in international politics that centers the international distribution of power. I make my argument through a close reading of Tate’s early writings in the 1930s and 1940s and compare it to contemporary writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and E.H. Carr. The article makes three contributions: it recovers Tate’s intellectual legacy and advances recognition of early twentieth-century black women thinkers; it develops the Howard School of International Relations’ contributions to IR theory; and it enriches our understanding of racism in the international system.

This paper analyzes two ideal-type signaling interactions that are fundamental to international relations: reassurance and coercive bargaining. In reassurance, states attempt to signal that their goals are compatible in order to avoid conflict, whereas in coercive bargaining, they attempt to inflate the incompatibility of their goals in order to increase their negotiating leverage over a disputed asset. This article conceptualizes these two types of signaling interaction and delineates semi-overlapping conditions under which each obtains. It then identifies three ways in which credible signaling occurs differently in reassurance versus coercive bargaining. First, the directional effects of power shifts are reversed in each interaction, generating incentives for rising states to misrepresent in reassurance but not in bargaining. Second, whereas signals that are costless to honest, high-resolve senders are widely available in bargaining, the most prominent reassurance signals are typically costly even to honest senders with benign intentions. Third, it is often difficult to infer which issue area motivates senders’ behaviors in reassurance, whereas in bargaining senders have incentives to reveal which issues they prioritize. In combination, these distinctions suggest that reassurance is systematically more difficult than signaling high resolve.

Critical discussion of empire and imperialism has become a key theme in international relations. Much confusion, however, is generated by a lack of consensus on the meaning of imperialism. This paper offers one avenue for clarifying the terms of debate by reconstructing the conceptual history of imperialism from its inception in the late nineteenth century to post-war IR theory. In its initial formulation at the turn of the twentieth century, the theory of imperialism sought to analyse the interplay of capitalist development and geopolitical conflict in the formation and reproduction of international hierarchies. Immediately after World War I, however, an intellectual counter-revolution narrowed the concept into a synonym of colonialism, or the formal rule and administration of subject territory. As anti-colonial struggles won independence in the post-war period, imperialism was increasingly understood as a thing of the past. The paper argues that this conceptual narrowing remains an obstacle to contemporary theorizing, and that a rereading of the classical theories can strengthen contemporary IR frameworks. A key implication of this argument is that renewing the theory of imperialism in IR entails a reintegration of political economy and security studies.

Active learning techniques tend to emphasize simulations, research projects, and the use of popular media to the relative neglect of problem-based approaches. This paper introduces a new problem-based exercise specifically for teaching international relations (IR) theories that builds on existing problem-based approaches by incorporating analogies and an exemplar-based approach to concept learning. Teaching complex IR theories to students, who are often early in their academic careers, can be a challenge for many academic staff. Our approach uses a carefully structured analogy, based on a dating scenario, to challenge students to explain and theorize the behaviour of the key actors in a way that is transferable to an IR analysis of state behaviour. The exercise yields an intuitive understanding of core theories that facilitates subsequent learning and application.

The second Trump administration has disrupted global climate politics, turning the United States away from the clean energy and environmental policies of the Biden administration. Consequently, analytical attention is turning, inside and outside of the United States, to a family of concepts referred to as “Climate Realism” (CR), which favors long-run investments in technology and adaptation over near-term climate mitigation efforts. We critically engage with CR and argue that political science identifies four key features of climate politics that shed light on CR’s strengths and weaknesses, and which will persist even in the second Trump era. Despite CR’s flaws, we contend that its emergence in reaction to the second Trump administration highlights some important dimensions of climate politics that deserve greater attention going forward. We highlight three topics for research: the political and practical strategies of the anti-green coalition; the heterogeneity in viable national economic strategies; and the implications for IR of a turn away from meaningful climate mitigation in powerful nations.

Political myths, the sacred narratives that legitimize power, are at the core of all political communities and organizations. In the post–World War II era, clear myths emerged around the ordering of the world, placing democracy, order, and peace at the idealized heart of global governance. Today, the international order is markedly changed. Previously dominant myths are routinely questioned and the international order that was built on these myths is beginning to fragment. Myths traditionally change with institutions. At this unique inflection point in the 2020s, however, this is no longer the case—myths crumble while the institutions they once supported persist, creating a vacuum in which novel myths must emerge in what we refer to as the new age of myth. We argue that the global order is in a transitional moment in terms of its governing mythologies. The myths that are born out of this age will underline the institutions, ideas, and ideologies that will shape the trajectory of the international order in the coming decades. In this essay we therefore argue that the study of political myths should be central to future approaches to international relations. Such an emphasis not only provides insight into the pathways of international cooperation and politics that may emerge from the contemporary shattering of the global political order, but also highlights how these sacred narratives will shape its future trajectory.

The concept of hedging has been recently introduced and has been gaining traction in International Relations (IR) literature. So far, the notion has been mainly employed to make sense of the strategic behaviour of some south-east Asian secondary states amid growing Sino-American great power competition. Hedging can be understood as a strategy through which a minor state avoids clearly aligning vis-à-vis two powerful vying actors, maintaining instead an in-between and balanced position. As such, hedging can be interpreted as a peculiar form of neutrality. Yet such a paralleling has not been spelled out clearly from a theoretical standpoint in the existing literature. Moreover, no attempt has been made to precisely position hedging among the different categories of neutrality. This is a major gap, as it deprives the hedging concept of much of its theoretical and analytical usefulness in informing scholarly analyses. By precisely locating hedging within the neutrality family and by identifying its main analytical features, this paper aims to clarify theoretically the ‘nature’ of the phenomenon. At the same time, such operation aims to move the hedging literature beyond its current overwhelming focus on contemporary south-east Asia, opening up interesting empirical perspectives for the study of hedging across time.

Affective ties encompass a broad family of emotional phenomena, including love, affection, attachment, and devotion. Affective ties may appear deeply personal, and they most certainly are. But they are also important resources for the exercise of political power in international politics – not only as vulnerabilities that can be exploited for coercion but also, and more significantly, as means to mobilise action and sacrifice. Viewed from the vantage point of political agents, affective ties are thus power resources whose distribution in the international system shapes their strategies and choices. Viewed from the perspective of the system, the international realm is not only characterised by struggles over material capabilities or ideas but also competition over affective ties. Correspondingly, nationalism is not simply an identity. It is a collection of techniques and practices for generating and capturing affective ties that has emerged as a highly effective contender in this contest, with crucial implications for how the international system is organised. That being said, other forms of eliciting affective ties also persist.

Does neorealism contain a conception of human nature? Although neorealists usually claim to sidestep the question of human nature altogether, scholars frequently trace the theory back to the work of Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher who in fact defended a robust account of human motivations. As a result, some scholars have concluded that neorealism contains a Hobbesian view of human nature. Against the conventional wisdom, this article argues that neorealism contains a Rousseauian philosophical anthropology. Whereas Hobbes provides a deeply pessimistic account of human motivations, Rousseau combines optimism about human motivations with pessimism about social structures. Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes profoundly influenced neorealism’s founding father, Kenneth Waltz, a political theorist who later gravitated towards International Relations. After exploring Waltz’s reading of Rousseau and demonstrating Rousseau’s influence on Waltz’s theory, the article investigates what is gained by reading neorealism as Rousseauian. Returning to the Rousseauian roots of neorealism reveals the true character of the tragic heuristic employed in neorealist theory, sheds new light on the role of pity in neorealist foreign policy, and clarifies the logic of the theory itself.

What is ontological (in)security? Recent scholarship on ontological security in International Relations has increasingly turned to the concept's theoretical origins in psychoanalysis and existential philosophy to address the field's (meta)theoretical limitations. This article argues that this development also necessitates an interrogation of the concept of ontological security itself to address the field's theoretical tensions. Further developing the nascent Kleinian approach to ontological security, this article conceptualises ontological (in)security as two distinct positions that denote the different ways in which subjects, be they individuals, groups, or states, manage anxiety. To develop this proposition, the article draws on Melanie Klein's work on the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to elucidate these positions of ontological (in)security, their respective defence mechanisms against anxiety, and their socio-political implications. This Kleinian approach facilitates a clear theoretical distinction between security and insecurity, providing an analytical toolbox to differentiate the various ways in which anxiety is managed in different positions. This framework particularly underscores the ethical, reparative, and transformative potential of the position of ontological security, aspects that have received limited theoretical and empirical attention to date.

Although expressivism has been studied in relation to criminal justice since the emergence of modern international criminal law, an expressivist perspective in norms and criminal justice research resurfaced in the past decades, inviting a new viewpoint on the dynamic interplay between norms and symbolic action in International Relations (IR). Situated as an account of punishment, expressivism has been criticised for being too abstract and lacking an immanent meaning or for its dialectic position in relation to punishment. Addressing this theoretical shortcoming, this article remediates our understanding of expressivism, establishing new knowledge of the meaning of norm expressivism in IR and clarifying the relationship between expressivism and notions of punishment in criminal justice and norm research. To this end, it hermeneutically deconstructs the rhetoric of country delegates at the United Nations in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It examines crucial examples of expressivism: disagreement pronouncements, denunciation of norm violation, postulation of guilt, and penal analogies. While criminal justice research posits expressivism as a distinct account of punishment, the novelty of this article consists in illustrating how, even in the absence of prosecution in the courtroom, expressivist rationales can have a reinforcing effect on the international legal order.

Despite the growing interest in secondary state efforts to avoid choosing sides in great power competition, International Relations scholars have paid scant attention to the question of how great powers respond to secondary state ‘hedging’. We offer a first approximation for this important question by focusing on ‘high-value’ hedgers, i.e. secondary states whose location or capabilities afford them the potential to tip the scales in a great power war. We posit that great powers are likely to accommodate high-value hedgers and refrain from trying to manipulate their alignment choice. This is because the likelihood and costs of losing a high-value hedger are such that competing great powers would rather be safe than sorry. Concretely, we expect established and rising great powers to (re)assure high-value hedgers: the former by demonstrating their commitment to a regional balance of power, and the latter by showing they harbour no ill intent towards the hedging secondary state. To probe our argument, we examine how Great Britain and Germany responded to Dutch hedging in the early 20th century, and how the United States and China are responding to Singapore’s hedging today.

Territory and territoriality lie at the heart of both world politics and International Relations (IR) theory. In terms of IR theory’s geographical assumptions, one of the most influential studies to date has been political geographer John Agnew’s 1994 article on the ‘the territorial trap’ (TTT). While Agnew’s original insights and subsequent research has reached canonical status in political geography, mainstream IR scholarship has yet to fully engage TTT. Political geographers, in turn, have largely dealt with the consequences of TTT for our understanding of world politics. This study offers the first detailed account of the origins of TTT, which are hidden in broad daylight in IR’s own history. The origins of TTT and mainstream IR are intertwined in terms of two dynamics: the racist and colonial origins of IR, and the selective nationalistic ontology that dominated IR especially in the first half of the 20th century. The arguments offered in this study have a wide variety of implications for problematising the ways in which IR-as-epistemological-community approaches territory and territoriality as well as our understanding of the origins and evolution of the present-day global territorial order.