This book provides an authoritative account of the controversy about the first great debate in the field of International Relations. Of all the self-images of International Relations, none is as pervasive and enduring as the notion that a great debate pitting idealists against realists took place in the 1940s. The story of the first great debate continues to structure the contemporary identity of International Relations, yet in recent years revisionist historians have challenged the conventional wisdom that the field experienced such a debate. Drawing on expert contributors working in Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this book includes key participants in the historiographical controversy. The book assembles the existing scholarship and provides a thorough analysis of the status of the first great debate in the history of International Relations. It is an invaluable examination of the causes and future direction of idealist and realist arguments. International Relations and the First Great Debate will be of interest to students and scholars concerned with the foundations of International Relations.

Based on extensive archival research, this book provides a new and stimulating history of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. Contrary to traditional accounts, it argues that IR was not invented by Anglo-American men after the First World War. Nor was it divided into neat theoretical camps. To appreciate the twists and turns of early IR scholarship, the book follows a diverse group of men and women from across Europe and beyond who pioneered the field since 1914. Like architects, they built a set of institutions (university departments, journals, libraries, etc.) but they also designed plans for a new world order (draft treaties, petitions, political commentary, etc.). To achieve these goals, they interacted closely with the League of Nations and its bodies for intellectual cooperation, until the Second World War put an end to their endeavour. Their story raises broader questions about the status of IR well beyond the inter-war period.

This book investigates to what extent and in what ways Marxist writings and precepts on imperialism informed the so-called idealist stage of International Relations (IR). Though the formative years of International Relations coincide with a vibrant period in Marxist political thought, Marxism is strikingly absent from the historiography of the discipline. Building on the work of revisionist scholars, the book reconstructs the writings of five benchmark IR thinkers. Villanueva analyzes the cases of John Hobson, Henry Brailsford, Leonard Woolf, Harold Laski and Norman Angell to explore the influence that Marxism played in their thinking, and in the “idealist years” of the discipline more generally. He ultimately demonstrates that, although Marxist thought has been neglected by mainstream IR disciplinary historians, it played a significant role in the discipline’s early development. As such, this book both challenges the exclusion of Marxist thought from the mainstream disciplinary histories of IR and contributes to a deeper understanding of the role it played in early 20th century IR theory.

This book discusses the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on international relations theories. As a phenomenon, AI is everywhere in the real world and growing. Through its transformative nature, it is simultaneously simplifying and complicating processes. Importantly, it also overlooks and “misunderstands”. Globally, leaders, diplomats and policymakers have had to familiarise themselves and grapple with concepts such as algorithms, automation, machine learning, and neural networks. These and other features of modern AI are redefining our world, and with it, the long-held assumptions scholars of IR have relied on for their theoretical accounts of our universe. The book takes a historic, contemporary and long-term approach to explain and anticipate AI’s impact on IR – and vice versa – through a systematic treatment of 9 theoretical paradigms and schools of thought including realism, liberalism, feminism, postcolonial theory and green theory. This book draws on original datasets, innovative empirical case studies and in-depth engagement with the core claims of the traditional and critical theoretical lenses to reignite debates on the nature and patterns of power, ethics, conflict, and systems among states and non-state actors.

Discover the intricate tapestry of international politics and governance with this book. The book delves into the diverse nature of globally significant actors and systems across multiple regions. From Africa to Asia, Europe to the Middle East, this collection of thought-provoking case studies explores the role of regional actors in the international system. Combining theoretical innovation with empirical analysis, this volume expands the boundaries of International Relations (IR) and Area Studies (AS), showcasing their interconnections throughout history and in contemporary contexts. Through illuminating case studies drawn from the fields of "Comparative Regionalism" and "Non-Western IR Theory," the book sheds light on pressing international events. Unpacking complex questions, the contributors examine the application of IR scholarship to global events and provide fresh insights into political dynamics, conflicts, and state instability across various regions. By offering a comparative perspective on threats, political contestation, and security policies, this book challenges existing perspectives and enriches the debate. With its methodological and epistemological explorations, this book is an indispensable resource for scholars and students of international relations and security studies, as well as researchers focusing on specific world areas. Embark on a captivating journey through the multifaceted landscape of global affairs.

Although he is widely regarded as the 'founding father' of realism in International Relations, this book argues that Hans J. Morgenthau's legal background has largely been neglected in discussions of his place in the 'canon' of IR theory. Morgenthau was a legal scholar of German-Jewish origins who arrived in the United States in 1938. He went on to become a distinguished professor of Political Science and a prominent commentator on international affairs. Rather than locate Morgenthau's intellectual heritage in the German tradition of 'Realpolitik', this book demonstrates how many of his central ideas and concepts stem from European and American legal debates of the 1920s and 1930s. This is an ambitious attempt to recast the debate on Morgenthau and will appeal to IR scholars interested in the history of realism as well as international lawyers engaged in debates regarding the relationship between law and politics, and the history of International Law.

Historical approaches to the study of world politics have always been a major part of the academic discipline of International Relations, and there has recently been a resurgence of scholarly interest in this area. This Oxford Handbook examines the past and present of the intersection between history and IR, and looks to the future by laying out new questions and directions for research. Seeking to transcend well-worn disciplinary debates between historians and IR scholars, the Handbook asks authors from both fields to engage with the central themes of 'modernity' and 'granularity'. Modernity is one of the basic organising categories of speculation about continuity and discontinuity in the history of world politics, but one that is increasingly questioned for privileging one kind of experience and marginalizing others. The theme of granularity highlights the importance of how decisions about the scale and scope of historical research in IR shape what can be seen, and how one sees it. Together, these themes provide points of affinity across the wide range of topics and approaches presented here. The Handbook is organized into four parts. The first, 'Readings', gives a state-of-the-art analysis of numerous aspects of the disciplinary encounter between historians and IR theorists. Thereafter, sections on 'Practices', 'Locales', and 'Moments' offer a wide variety of perspectives, from the longue durée to the ephemeral individual moment, and challenge many conventional ways of defining the contexts of historical enquiry about international relations. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds, and present a diverse array of methodological and philosophical ideas, as well as their various historical interests. The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a twelve-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-fields of International Relations. The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smit of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford, with each volume edited by specialists in the field. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example of Reus-Smit and Snidal's original Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by scholars drawn from different perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.

"Abstract: With the rapid rise of China and the relative decline of the United States, the topic of power transition conflicts is back in popular and scholarly attention. The discipline of International Relations offers much on why violent power transition conflicts occur, yet very few substantive treatments exist on why and how peaceful changes happen in world politics. This Handbook is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject of peaceful change in International Relations. It contains some 41 chapters, all written by scholars from different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds examining the multi-faceted dimensions of this subject. In the first part, key conceptual and definitional clarifications are offered and in the second part, papers address the historical origins of peaceful change as an International Relations subject matter during the Inter-War, Cold War, and Post-Cold War eras. In the third part, each of the IR theoretical traditions and paradigms in particular Realism, liberalism, constructivism and critical perspectives and their distinct views on peaceful change are analyzed. In the fourth part papers tackle the key material, ideational and social sources of change. In the fifth part, the papers explore selected great and middle powers and their foreign policy contributions to peaceful change, realizing that many of these states have violent past or tend not to pursue peaceful policies consistently. In part six, the contributors evaluate the peaceful change that occurred in the world's key regions. In the final part, the editors address prospective research agenda and trajectories on this important subject matter. Keywords: Peaceful Change; War; Security; International Relations Theory; Sources of Change; Systemic Theory; Realism; Liberalism; Constructivism; Critical Theories"--

Where is Marxism in International Relations? The answer lies in this collective work by Brazilian authors who have looked to Marxist theory for an alternative perspective, and therefore outside the dominant ideas in the field, to analyse International Relations. Specifically, the answer is divided into themes: key ideas by Marx and Engels for IR, Marxist thinkers as IR theorists, Marxist theories on imperialism, and the Latin-American theory on dependency. With the end result, this book adds to the international intellectual efforts to criticize and overcome capitalism.

This book recovers the history of realist theorization on nationalism and the nation-state. Presented in a sequence of snapshots and illustrated by examples drawn from the foreign policy of great powers, this history is represented by four key realist thinkers. It uses the centrality of power in realism as a starting point to claim, contrary to conventional wisdom about realism, that for realists the state is better understood not as a political unit outside history but rather as a manifestation of power unfixed in time. It also claims that the process of gradual impoverishment of the concept of power from classical to structural realism had profound implications for realism, as what the latter gained in parsimony it lost in analytical purchase. As a result, elaborate understandings of nationalism and its relation to the state are replaced by one-dimensional approaches. In order to offer meaningful engagement with foreign policy, neorealists often have to resort to the recovery of some of the complexity of classical realist accounts.