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Bisley reviews 'Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and The Neoliberal Challenge' edited by Charles W. Kegley Jr.

AbstractThe triumphalism of the immediate post‐ColdWar period in theUnitedStates has faded, and concern about decline has returned. In the field of international relations, the return of power transition models is exemplary of the new mood. This article argues that realist models misjudge the source of foreign policy risks for theUnitedStates and its allies. Rather, the standard canon of liberal international relations theory also suggests sources of pessimism. These include the enduring nature of authoritarian rule, the difficulty of coordinating emerging actors through existing international institutions, and the ambiguous effects of increased interdependence on the foreign policy behaviour and leverage of emerging powers.

Under the banner of "regime theory," the study of international relations has experienced a massive if largely unacknowledged return to law, the study of the nature, scope, and relevance of norms international politics. Regime is shorthand for forms of institutionalized cooperation in the international system. The article provides one way to assess this movement. In part I, I develop an abstract conception of constitutions as bodies of metanorms, those higher order norms that govern how lower order norms are to be produced, applied, and interpreted. I then examine the extent to which international relations theory is equipped to recognize that some international regimes are constitutional in form (part II). In part III, I propose a means of situating all regime forms, from the most primitive to the full blown constitutional, along a continuum. The central claim is that the distinction made between international and domestic society, for the most part a matter of dogma in mainstream theory, is relative not absolute.

"Challenges to Traditional International Relations Theory Posed by Environmental Change" published on by Oxford University Press.

The question of endings is simultaneously a question of beginnings: wondering if International Relations is at an end inevitably raises the puzzle of when and how 'it' began. This article argues that International Relations' origins bear striking resemblance to a wider movement in post-war American political studies that Ira Katznelson calls the 'political studies enlightenment.' This story of the field's beginnings and ends has become so misunderstood as to have almost disappeared from histories of the field and accounts of its theoretical orientations and alternatives. This historical forgetting represents one of the most debilitating errors of International Relations theory today, and overcoming it has significant implications for how we think about the past and future development of the field. In particular, it throws open not only our understanding of the place of realism in International Relations, but also our vision of liberalism. For the realism of the International Relations enlightenment did not seek to destroy liberalism as an intellectual and political project, but to save it. The core issue in the 'invention of International Relations theory' — its historical origins as well as its end or goal in a substantive or normative sense — was not the assertion of realism in opposition to liberalism: it was, in fact, the defence of a particular kind of liberalism.

Until the end of the Cold War, it is not an exaggeration to say that only a few theorists of International Relations (IR) or policy-makers engaged in either substantial investigation or articulation of the links between cultural variables like religion and ethnicity on one hand and international affairs on the other. In our article, we argue that this pattern does not do justice to the nature of mainstream IR theories. Although studies are accumulating, how (or whether) religion as a variable can be integrated into mainstream IR thinking still remains in question. We look at three main traditions in IR theory — classical realism, structural realism and neoliberalism — to see how religion can contribute to our understanding of international affairs within those frameworks. We claim that, without stretching the limits of theories or disturbing their intellectual coherence, possibilities for two-way interactions between the frameworks and identity-related variables like religion can be identified.