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Meaning and international relations: some thoughts / Andrew Williams -- Surfing the Zeitgeist / Christopher Coker -- The delocalisation of meaning / Zaki Laïdi -- Meaning and social transformations: ideology in a post-ideological age / Gerard Delanty -- Eurosomnia: Europe's 'spiritual vitality' and the debate on the European idea / Stefan Elbe -- Whose meaning(s)?!: a feminist perspective on the crisis of meaning in international relations / Annick T.R. Wibben -- The search for meaning in global conjunctions: from ethnographic truth to ethnopolitical agency / Tarja Väyrynen -- When meaning travels: Muslim translocality and the politics of 'authenticity' / Peter Mandaville -- Messianic moments and the religious (re)turn in international relations / Andrea den Boer -- Reliving the Boxer Uprising, or, The restricted meaning of civilisation / Stephen Chan -- On the danger of premature conclusion(s) / Peter Mandaville

This article starts from the observation that International Relations scholars do not agree on what they mean by theory. The declining popularity of grand theory and the celebration of theoretical pluralism are accompanied by the relative absence of a serious conversation about what 'theory' is or should be. Taking the view that we need such a conversation, especially given the shallow theorizing of modern scholarship that conflates theory with method, and the postmodern view that abstract narratives must be deconstructed and rejected, this article puts forward the notion of 'deep theorizing' as the ground for grand theory. Specifically, it argues that deep theorizing is the conceptual effort of explaining (inter)action by developing a reading of drives/basic motivations and the ontology of its carrier through an account of the human condition, that is, a particular account of how the subject (the political actor) is positioned in social space and time. The article illustrates this angle through a discussion of realist, liberal and postcolonial schools of thought. It basically argues that, through their particular readings of the human condition, these approaches develop distinct conceptions of political agency and, hence of the nature and location of world politics.