Surveying six decades of scholarship, 'Recovering International Relations' suggests new ethical and methodological foundations for the study of world politics. IR is conceived as a vocation one that must balance the insights of normative and empirical theory against each other to address a densely populated heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.

Recovering International Relations bridges two key divides in contemporary IR: between 'value-free' and normative theory, and between reflective, philosophically inflected explorations of ethics in scholarship and close, empirical studies of practical problems in world politics. Featuring a novel, provocative and detailed survey of IR's development over the second half of the twentieth century, the work draws on early Frankfurt School social theory to suggest a new ethical and methodological foundation for the study of world politics-sustainable critique-which draws these disparate approaches together in light of their common aims, and redacts them in the face of their particular limitations. Understanding the discipline as a vocation as well as a series of academic and methodological practices, sustainable critique aims to balance the insights of normative and empirical theory against each other. Each must be brought to bear if scholarship is to meaningfully, and responsibly, address an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.

Surveying six decades of scholarship, Recovering International Relations suggests new ethical and methodological foundations for the study of world politics. IR is conceived as a vocation; one that must balance the insights of normative and empirical theory against each other to address a densely populated, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world.

Realist theory has dominated the study of international relations for more than half a century. In this provocative book, Lee Ryan Miller demonstrates that each of the fundamental assumptions of realism is seriously flawed. Then he pulls together the strands of a number of phenomena that cannot be explained by realism - the development of the European Union, the phenomenon of "democratic peace," and the economic success of democratic states - to develop a liberal theory of international relations.

The central claim developed in this book is that disciplinary International Relations (IR) is identifiable as both an advanced colonial practice and a postcolonial subject. The starting problematic here issues from disciplinary IR's relative dearth of attention to indigenous peoples, their knowledges, and the distinctive ways of knowing that underwrite them. The book begins by exploring how IR has internalized many of the enabling narratives of colonialism in the Americas, evinced most tellingly in its failure to take notice of indigenous peoples. More fundamentally, IR is read as a conduit for what the author terms the 'hegemonologue' of the dominating society: a knowing hegemonic Western voice that, owing to its universalist pretensions, speaks its knowledge to the exclusion of all others.

Drawing together international experts on research methods in International Relations (IR), this Handbook answers the complex practical questions for those approaching a new research topic for the first time. Innovative in its approach, it considers the art of IR research as well as the science, offering diverse perspectives on current research methods and emerging developments in the field.

Reflexivity has become a common term in IR scholarship with a variety of uses and meanings. Yet for such an important concept and referent, understandings of reflexivity have been more assumed rather than developed by those who use it, from realists and constructivists to feminists and post-structuralists. This volume seeks to provide the first overview of reflexivity in international relations theory, offering students and scholars a text that : provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the current reflexivity literature develops important insights into how reflexivity can play a broader role in IR theory pushes reflexivity in new, productive directions, and offers more nuanced and concrete specifications of reflexivity moves reflexivity beyond the scholar and the scholarly field to political practice Formulates practices of reflexivity. Drawing together the work of many of the key scholars in the field into one volume, this work will be essential reading for all students of international relations theory.

Many scholars, intentionally or unintentionally, have entangled constructivisms and critical theories in problematic ways, either by assigning a critical-theoretical politics to constructivisms or by assuming the appropriateness of constructivist epistemology and methods for critical theorizing. IR's Last Synthesis? makes the argument that these connections mirror IR's grand theoretical syntheses of the 1980s and 1990s and have similar constraining effects on the possibilities of IR theory. They have been made without adequate reflection, in contradiction to the base assumptions of each theoretical perspective, and to the detriment of both knowledge accumulation about global politics and theoretical rigor in disciplinary IR. It is not that constructivisms and critical theories have no common ground; rather, the fact that it has become routine for IR scholars to overstate their common ground is counterproductive to the discovery and utilization of their potential dialogues. To that end, IR's Last Synthesis? argues that scholars using the two in conjunction should be cognizant of, rather than gloss over, the tensions between the approaches and the tools they have to offer. Along these lines, the book uses the concept of affordances to look at what each has to offer the other, and to argue for a modest, reflective, specified return to (constructivist and critical) IR theorizing. By rejecting its over-simple syntheses, this book hews a road toward reviving IR theorizing.

The SAGE Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations offers a panoramic overview of the broad field of International Relations by integrating three distinct but interrelated foci. It retraces the historical development of International Relations (IR) as a professional field of study, explores the philosophical foundations of IR, and interrogates the sociological mechanisms through which scholarship is produced and the field is structured. Comprising 38 chapters from both established scholars and an emerging generation of innovative meta-theorists and theoretically driven empiricists, the handbook fosters discussion of the field from the inside out, forcing us to come to grips with the widely held perception that IR is experiencing an existential crisis quite unlike anything else in its hundred-year history. This timely and innovative reference volume reflects on situated scholarly practices in a way that projects our collective thinking into the future. PART ONE: THE INWARD GAZE: INTRODUCTORY REFLECTIONS PART TWO: IMAGINING THE INTERNATIONAL, ACKNOWLEDGING THE GLOBAL PART THREE: THE SEARCH FOR (AN) IDENTITY PART FOUR: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS A PROFESSION PART FIVE: LOOKING AHEAD: THE FUTURE OF META-ANALYSIS