New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 18, no. 2, July 2026) is out. Contents include:

• Constanza Guajardo, The ethics of the international monetary system
• Joseph MacKay, Realism, ideology, and exile
• Brandon K. Yoder, Reassurance versus coercive bargaining: barriers to cooperative signaling in international relations
• Symposium
• Thomas Kwasi Tieku, J. Andrew Grant, & Karolina Werner, African systems of thought and IR: the road to epistemic justice
• Lina Benabdallah, Contrapuntal reading of ‘Africa rising’: seeing Africa in International Relations beyond the exceptional
• W. R. Nadège Compaoré, Pan-Africanism or Black internationalism? Evoking African political thought as political activism
• Evelyn Namakula-Mayanja & Afua Boatemaa Yakohene, International Relations in Africa: not without Indigenous knowledge systems
• Mohamed Sesay, Rectifying injustices against humanity: communitarianism, Ubuntu, and restoration
• Peace A. Medie, African feminisms in International Relations
• Fikir Haile & Badriyya Yusuf, IR Resource Bank: a tool for diversifying and decolonizing the curriculum

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 18, no. 1, March 2026) is out. Contents include:

• Liwu Gan, Weighing responsibilities: the allocation of fair refugee quotas
• Hye Yun Kang, Atmospheric violence: Fanon and postcolonial subjectivity
• Tim Rood, E. H. Carr and Alfred Zimmern: utopia, reality, and the twenty years’ crisis
• Jelena Cupać, Are international organizations agents in their own right? A plural subject perspective
• Lukas Grundsfeld, ‘The Conduct of Inquiry’ in ontological security studies: scientific methodologies and their implications
• Jason Ralph, International society as an ontological security provider: a framework for analysis

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 17, no. 3, November 2025) is out. Contents include:

• Liliana B. Andonova, The scope of accountability of international organisations: the relevance of power, institutional structure, and salience
• Kilian Spandler, Rethinking democracy in global network governance: norm polysemy, pluralism, and agonistic engagement
• Jean-Frédéric Morin & Pauline Pic, Sequencing binding and non-binding agreements: the case of outer space governance
• Alexander Lanoszka, Non-aggression pacts: context and explanation
• Aditi Sahasrabuddhe & Jack Seddon, The perils of technocratic power: central bank discretion and the end of Bretton Woods revisited
• Rens van Munster, Through the surrealist looking glass: international theory, imagination, and the Anthropocene
• Charlie Thame, The tripartite structure of critical international theory

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 17, no. 2, July 2025) is out. Contents include:

• Owen R. Brown & Arturo Chang, Negotiating racial subjection: analysing Black and Indigenous resistance from within colonial orders
• Todd H. Hall & Patrick James, The ties that bind: on affective ties, power, nationalism, and competition over the global distribution of feeling
• Elif Kalaycioglu, Confirming, suturing and transforming international recognition: the case of world heritage
• Lucia M. Rafanelli, The spectre of statelessness
• Reply and Rejoinder
• Yong-Soo Eun, Peter Marcus Kristensen, & Deepshikha Shahi, How (not) to advance Global IR: a rejoinder
• Michael Barnett & Ayşe Zarakol, Reply to ‘How (not) to advance Global IR: a rejoinder’

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 17, no. 1, March 2025) is out. Contents include:

• Sinja Graf, Law, time, and (in)justice after empire: Germany's objection to colonial reparations and the chronopolitics of deflection
• Zeger Verleye, Failing the state self: on the politics of state shame
• Liam Moore, Contesting clusters: a study of norm weaving in Pacific climate mobilities policies
• Valentin Clavé-Mercier, Indigenous political theory, metaphysical revolt, and the decolonial rearticulation of political ordering
• C. Nicolai L. Gellwitzki, The positions of ontological (in)security in international relations: object relations, unconscious phantasies, and anxiety management

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 16, no. 3, November 2024) is out. Contents include:

• Katharine M. Millar, Limitations of hypocrisy as a strategy of critique in international politics
• Brieg Powel, The ‘Mesopotamian trap’: from the ‘first’ international to dynamic multiplicity
• Gabriel Mares, Recovering African contestation and innovation in global politics: Francis Deng and sovereignty-as-responsibility
• Sean W.D. Gray & Mark E. Warren, What kind of power can citizens exercise beyond the state? Globalizing democracy through representative claim-making
• Alex Prichard, Kenneth Waltz's Kantian moral philosophy: ‘the virtues of anarchy’ reconsidered

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 16, no. 2, July 2024) is out. Contents include:

• Scott Wolford & Toby J. Rider, Weak sovereignty and interstate war
• Patrick J. McDonald & Kevin Galambos, Trilateral politics in hierarchy, war, and state formation
• Kate Yoon, The many faces of sovereignty
• David Lefkowitz, A new philosophy for international legal skepticism?
• Tim Beaumont, John Stuart Mill on the Suez Canal and the limits of self-defence

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 16, no. 1, March 2024) is out. Contents include:

• Nancy Bertoldi, Property and international relations: lessons from Locke on anarchy and sovereignty
• Mitja Sienknecht & Antje Vetterlein, Conceptualizing responsibility in world politics
• Guillaume Beaumier, Marielle Papin, & Jean-Frédéric Morin, A combinatorial theory of institutional invention
• Itamar Mann, Law and politics from the sea
• Sebastian Schindler, Post-truth politics and neoliberal competition: the social sources of dogmatic cynicism
• Marina Vulović & Filip Ejdus, Object-cause of desire and ontological security: evidence from Serbia's opposition to Kosovo's membership in UNESCO

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 15, no. 3, November 2023) is out. Contents include:

• Ivan Fomin, Strategic culture as a meaning-making system: towards a social semiotic account of multimodal cultural constraints in international relations
• Jeffrey Robertson & Andrew Carr, Is anyone a middle power? The case for historicization
• John de Bhal, Rethinking ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice: stratification, ambiguity, and power
• Symposium: A Symposium on Global IR
• Michael Barnett & Ayşe Zarakol, Global international relations and the essentialism trap
• Tarak Barkawi, Christopher Murray, & Ayşe Zarakol, The United Nations of IR: power, knowledge, and empire in Global IR debates
• Martin J. Bayly, Global at birth: a relational sociology of disciplinary knowledge in IR and the case of India
• Victoria Tin-bor Hui, ‘Getting Asia right’: de-essentializing China's hegemony in historical Asia
• Michael Barnett & George Lawson, Three visions of the global: global international relations, global history, global historical sociology
• Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, Manjeet S. Pardesi, & Musab Younis, Response section

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 15, no. 2, July 2023) is out. Contents include:

• Janina Dill, Threats to state survival as emergencies in international law
• Regan Burles, Globalizing the international: Bull's metaphysics of order
• Matthew Draper & Stephan Haggard, The authoritarian challenge: liberal thinking on autocracy and international relations, 1930–45
• Derek Bolton, The unbearable lightness of being? Reconfiguring the moral underpinnings and sources of ontological security
• Sarah Sunn Bush & Sarah S. Stroup, Stay off my field: policing boundaries in human rights and democracy promotion
• Shmuel Nili, Getting away with it? Kleptocracy, atrocities, and the morality of autocratic exile
• Maria Birnbaum, The costs of recognition: global politics, religion, and the colonial history of South Asia

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 15, no. 1, March 2023) is out. Contents include:

• Ranjoo Seodu Herr, Overlapping consensus view of human rights: a Rawlsian conception
• Moritz S. Graefrath & Marcel Jahn, Conceptualizing interstate cooperation
• Costas M. Constantinou & Fiona McConnell, On the right to diplomacy: historicizing and theorizing delegation and exclusion at the United Nations
• Jonathan Gilmore, Conceptualizing good global statehood: progressive foreign policy after the populist moment
• Christian Nikolaus Braun, Quo Vadis? On the role of just peace within just war
• Thomas Gehring & Kevin Urbanski, Member-dominated international organizations as actors: a bottom-up theory of corporate agency

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 14, no. 3, November 2022) is out. Contents include:

• Forum
• Patricia Owens, Sarah C. Dunstan, Kimberly Hutchings, & Katharina Rietzler, Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
• Adom Getachew, Duncan Bell, Cynthia Enloe, & Vineet Thakur, Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
• Research Articles
• Ersel Aydinli & Onur Erpul, The false promise of global IR: exposing the paradox of dependent development
• Suwita Hani Randhawa, International criminalization and the historical emergence of international crimes
• Valentina Gentile & Megan Foster, Towards a minimal conception of Transitional Justice
• Eric Van Rythoven, Walter Lippmann, emotion, and the history of international theory
• Laura Considine, Narrative and nuclear weapons politics: the entelechial force of the nuclear origin myth
• Eric Heinze, Global libertarianism: how much public morality does international human rights law allow?

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 14, no. 2, July 2022) is out. Contents include:

• Tanya Narozhna, The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war: toward an embodied ontology of war as experience
• Alena Drieschova, Representants and international orders
• Ian Hurd, The case against international cooperation
• Clive Gabay, Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure
• Bernd Bucher & Julian Eckl, Football's contribution to international order: the ludic and festive reproduction of international society by world societal actors
• Joseph MacKay, Kenneth Waltz's approach to reading classic political theory and why it matters
• Amoz J. Y. Hor, The everyday emotional lives of aid workers: how humanitarian anxiety gets in the way of meaningful local participation

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 14, no. 1, March 2022) is out. Contents include:

• Articles
  • Sarah Teo, Toward a differentiation-based framework for middle power behavior
  • Lee McConnell, Opportunity and impasse: social change and the limits of international legal strategy
  • Sinan Chu, Whither Chinese IR? The Sinocentric subject and the paradox of Tianxia-ism
  • Quentin Bruneau, Converging paths: bounded rationality, practice theory and the study of change in historical international relations
• Book Symposium: Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology
• Toni Erskine, Stefano Guzzini, & David A. Welch, Preface
• Alexander Wendt, Why IR scholars should care about quantum theory, part I: burdens of proof and uncomfortable facts
• Andrew H. Kydd, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and quantum mechanics
• Fred Chernoff, ‘Truth’, ‘justice’, and the American wave… function: comments on Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science
• Sergei Prozorov, Otherwise than quantum
• Friedrich Kratochwil, The strange fate of the morphed ‘rump materialism’: a comment on the vagaries of social science as seen through Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science
• Kimberly Hutchings, Empire and insurgency: the politics of truth in Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology
• Alexander Wendt, Why IR scholars should care about quantum theory, part II: critics in the PITs

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 13, no. 3, November 2021) is out. Contents include:

• Articles
  • Kenneth W. Abbott & Benjamin Faude, Choosing low-cost institutions in global governance
  • Sean Fleming, Leviathan on trial: should states be held criminally responsible?
  • Stephen Aris, International vs. area? The disciplinary-politics of knowledge-exchange between IR and Area Studies
  • Gabriel Mares, Just war theory after colonialism and the war on terror: reexamining non-combatant immunity
• Symposium: In the Midst of Theory and Practice
• Hannes Peltonen & Knut Traisbach, In the midst of theory and practice
• Hannes Peltonen & Knut Traisbach, In the midst of theory and practice: a foreword
• Antje Wiener, A field day with Fritz: introduction to the Symposium
• Nicholas Onuf, Bewitching the world: remarks on ‘Inter-disciplinarity, the epistemological ideal of incontrovertible foundations, and the problem of praxis’
• Knut Traisbach, On concepts, conceptions, and conceptors: remarks ‘On the concept of law’
• Xymena Kurowska, Politics as Realitätsprinzip in the debate on constitutions and fragmented orders: remarks ‘On constitutions and fragmented orders’
• Christian Bueger, Meditating deformalization: remarks on ‘Of experts, helpers, and enthusiasts’
• Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça, Hope behind the critique of grand narratives of collective salvation: remarks on ‘The power of metaphors and narratives’
• Oliver Westerwinter, From meditation to action – a research agenda for studying informal global rule-making: remarks on ‘Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”’
• Jennifer M. Welsh, Unsettling times for human rights: remarks on ‘The politics of rights’
• Kathryn Sikkink, Meditating on rights and responsibility: remarks on ‘the limits and burdens of rights’
• Hannes Peltonen, Sense and sensibility or: remarks on the ‘bounds of (non)sense’
• Friedrich Kratochwil, On engagement and distance in social analysis: a reply to my critics

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 13, no. 2, July 2021) is out. Contents include:

• Ana Tanasoca & John S. Dryzek, Democratic altruism
• Jaakko Heiskanen, Found in translation: the global constitution of the modern international order
• Adam B. Lerner, What's it like to be a state? An argument for state consciousness
• Bernhard Reinsberg, Fully-automated liberalism? Blockchain technology and international cooperation in an anarchic world
• Stephane J. Baele & Gregorio Bettiza, ‘Turning’ everywhere in IR: on the sociological underpinnings of the field's proliferating turns
• Seanon S. Wong, One-upmanship and putdowns: the aggressive use of interaction rituals in face-to-face diplomacy
• Charles Butcher & Ryan Griffiths, War, interaction capacity, and the structures of state systems

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 13, no. 1, March 2021) is out. Contents include:

• Articles
• Jack Donnelly, Levels, centers, and peripheries: the spatio-political structure of political systems
• Peter Marcus Kristensen, ‘Peaceful change’ in International Relations: a conceptual archaeology
• Robert Yates, The English School and postcolonial state agency: social roles and order management in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific
• Symposium: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation in Global Governance:
• Orfeo Fioretos & Jonas Tallberg, Politics and theory of global governance
• Robert O. Keohane, The global politics paradigm: guide to the future or only the recent past?
• Nicole Deitelhoff & Christopher Daase, Rule and resistance in global governance
• Michael Barnett, Change in or of global governance?
• Vincent Pouliot, Global governance in the age of epistemic authority
• Anna Leander, Locating (new) materialist characters and processes in global governance
• Judith G. Kelley & Beth A. Simmons, Governance by Other Means: Rankings as Regulatory Systems
• Jan Aart Scholte, Beyond institutionalism: toward a transformed global governance theory
• Michael Zürn, On the role of contestations, the power of reflexive authority, and legitimation problems in the global political system

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 12, no. 3, November 2020) is out. Contents include:

• Articles
• Naomi Head, Sentimental politics or structural injustice? The ambivalence of emotions for political responsibility
• Sasikumar S. Sundaram, Varieties of political rhetorical reasoning: norm types, scorekeepers, and political projects
• Daniel Schwartz, Discovery Rights and the Arctic
• Symposium: Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics
• Jacques E. C. Hymans, Introduction to the symposium. The concept of protean power: change we can believe in?
• Emanuel Adler, Control power as a special case of protean power: thoughts on Peter Katzenstein and Lucia Seybert's Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics
• George F. DeMartino & Ilene Grabel, Irreparable ignorance, protean power, and economics
• Stefano Guzzini, Protean power as a plea for an open social ontology, non-efficient causal explanations, and cautious political practice
• Benoît Pelopidas, Power, luck, and scholarly responsibility at the end of the world(s)
• Michael Zürn, Unknown effects of social innovations
• Peter J. Katzenstein, Protean power: a second look

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 12, no. 2, July 2020) is out. Contents include:

• Articles
• Jack L. Amoureux, Is faster better? Political and ethical framings of pace and space
• Earl Gammon, Affective neuroscience, emotional regulation, and international relations
• Miles M. Evers, Just the facts: why norms remain relevant in an age of practice
• Simon Frankel Pratt, Reification, practice, and the ontological status of social facts
• Symposium: Anxiety, Fear, and Ontological Security in World Politics
• Catarina Kinnvall & Jennifer Mitzen, Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world politics: thinking with and beyond Giddens
• Bahar Rumelili, Integrating anxiety into international relations theory: Hobbes, existentialism, and ontological security
• Felix Berenskötter, Anxiety, time, and agency
• Badredine Arfi, Security qua existential surviving (while becoming otherwise) through performative leaps of faith
• John Cash, Psychoanalysis, cultures of anarchy, and ontological insecurity
• Andrew R. Hom & Brent J. Steele, Anxiety, time, and ontological security's third-image potential

New Issue: International Theory

The latest issue of International Theory (Vol. 12, no. 1, March 2020) is out. Contents include:

• Chris Thornhill, Constitutionalism and populism: national political integration and global legal integration
• Nora Stappert, Practice theory and change in international law: theorizing the development of legal meaning through the interpretive practices of international criminal courts
• Simon Frankel Pratt, From norms to normative configurations: a pragmatist and relational approach to theorizing normativity in IR
• David Jason Karp, What is the responsibility to respect human rights? Reconsidering the ‘respect, protect, and fulfill’ framework
• Jack Snyder, Backlash against human rights shaming: emotions in groups
• Marcus Holmes & Nicholas J. Wheeler, Social bonding in diplomacy