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This article explores the development of international relations (IR) in Indonesia with special focus on the changing trends in its theoretical perspectives. It argues that the academic works examined reflect the ways in which Indonesia's IR scholars perceive and theorize the nature of the dynamics of external political environments and their connections to the state's foreign relations. The argument is elaborated in two related parts. The first section discusses the theoretical perspectives that developed during the Cold War period, which focuses on the propensity toward historical realism and regionalism. The second part of the discussion examines recent developments in which Cold War perspectives have been reconsidered, and in many respects modified into three new categories of theoretical thinking, namely reform, resistance, and eclecticism. The changing theoretical trends reveal that Indonesia's IR scholarship is open and innovative. The conclusion comments on the development of the Indonesia's IR.

This article argues that communities of practice (CoPs) provide IR with a unique way to understand how a small group of committed people can make a difference to international politics. The point is addressed in three steps. First, the article advances our understanding of how CoPs work. While at its core a CoP is a group of people brought together by a practice they enjoy, a CoP also shares a sense of timing, placing, and humour. These aspects help the group anchor, refine, and innovate their practice in the face of challenges and uncertainty. Second, the article contrasts the analysis of CoPs with other IR approaches, especially institutional analysis, network analysis, and epistemic communities, to show how CoPs supplement them. Third, the article illustrates the argument with the example of the EU foreign policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It concludes by suggesting that a CoP's perspective not only helps IR better understand informal politics, but also opens up conversations across disciplines.

This article theorises the nexus between mnemonical status anxiety and militant memory laws. Extending the understanding of status-seeking in international relations to the realm of historical memory, I argue that the quest for mnemonical recognition is a status struggle in an international social hierarchy of remembering constitutive events of the past. A typology of mnemopolitical status-seeking is presented on the example of Russia (mnemonical positionalism), Poland (mnemonical revisionism), and Ukraine (mnemonical self-emancipation). Memory laws provide a common instance of securing and/or improving a state's mnemonical standing in the relevant memory order. Drawing on the conceptual analogy of militant democracy, the article develops the notion militant memocracy, or the governance of historical memory through a dense network of prescribing and proscribing memory laws and policies. Alike its militant democracy counterpart, militant memocracy is in danger of self-inflicted harm to the object of defence in the very effort to defend it: its precautionary and punitive measures resound rather than fix the state's mnemonical anxiety problem.

International business has always been intimately linked to the politics of the global economy. Expansion and investment strategies of business play a key role in de?ning the architecture of the global economy. The shifting dynamic of the global economy such as the emergence of fast growing economies in, for example, India, China, South Africa and Brazil can be partly explained by the emergence of new market players such as the India transnational car manufacturer Tata, as well as the adaptation of established international businesses in the West to the new market opportunities in the South and the East. Equally, the recent (and in places ongoing) economic crises of the West owes as much to the failures of international business — notably the banking and investment industry — as it does to the failures of government policy. At the same time the international political dimension to the global economy explains the regulatory forces which also determine the architecture of the global economy. The far reaching policy liberalization of international trade through international (namely the World Trade Organisation) and regional treaties and rule- making, and the global deregulation of the investment and ?nancial services sector of the global economy driven by the neoliberal policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have created economic risks and opportunities for international business by opening up and creating new markets. The strategies of nation states and international business determine the architecture of the global economy and create both economic crises and dynamic growth at one and the same time in the contemporary global economy. So it is that for much of the ?rst decade or so of the new century the West has endured an age of austerity brought on by sustained economic decline and high indebtedness. The once market dominant economies of the United States and West European economies are now struggling to reverse negative economic growth. By contrast large previously peripheral under- developed economies in Africa and Asia are enjoying remarkable and sustained growth rates and their exports and investments now fuel an overall growth in the global economy.

Research on norms in International Relations (IR) includes various concepts related to how norms influence actions. These approaches focus on the decision-making process, and largely neglect the operationalization of norms. This omission leads to an analytical gap: a lack of attention to how the substance of abstract norms is transformed and constructed in the operationalization process. This article draws on the Foucauldian theme of governmentality to introduce a novel perspective on operationalizing norms. It focuses in particular on the role of techniques as understudied parts inherent to the reflexive processes of operationalization and meaning production. The article thereby contests the prevalence of fundamental norms in conventional IR theory. It demonstrates, instead, that global governance techniques do not simply translate rationalities into practice, but construct their very own normativities. These theoretical reflections are illustrated by analysing the operationalization of norms through indicators in the case of the European Union's human rights policy.

Building, or re-building, states after war or crisis is a contentious process. But why? This book argues that to best answer the question, we need to engage with the people who are supposedly benefiting from international 'expertise'. This book challenges and enhances standard 'critical' narratives of statebuilding by exploring the historical experiences and interpretive frameworks of the people targeted by intervention. Drawing on face-to-face interviews, archival research, policy reviews and in-country participant-observations carried out over several years, the book challenges assumptions underpinning external interventions, such as the incapacity of 'local' agents to govern and the necessity of 'liberal' values in demanding better governance. The analysis focuses on Mozambique, long hailed as one of international donors' great success stories, but whose peaceful, prosperous, democratic future now hangs in the balance. Its conclusions underscore the significance of thinking with rather than for the targets of state-building assistance, and appreciating the historical and material conditions which underpin these reform efforts.

According to official Turkish and Western historiography, following the key victories against the Nazi German forces, the Soviet leadership changed its position and started putting pressure on Turkey. Accordingly, the Soviet-Turkish relations changed significantly almost overnight from being considered friendly until March 1945, when Molotov initiated his note denouncing the 1925 Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression with Turkey and demanded a base in the Straits area and the return of Kars and Ardahan to the Soviet Union. Only after such hostile demands, the Turkish government decided to move away from the Soviets and requested help from the US. I have several points of reservation about this line of argument: firstly, the Soviet-Turkish relations were never very friendly. Essentially, a common enemy incited provisional collaboration between the two. Secondly, for the leadership of the Turkish Republic, alliance with the Soviet Union was always counted as temporary, and their essential foreign policy aim had always been to be accepted by the Western system of alliance. Thirdly, the Soviet demands regarding the Turkish Straits were in no sense a surprise, a shock, to anyone. For centuries, the rulers of Russia had wanted some kind of control over the Straits, linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Finally, many existing accounts focus on the Soviet demands regarding the Straits and Eastern Anatolian provinces in isolation. The crisis over the so-called Soviet demands and Turkish response happened at a time the global inter-state system was going through one of its major transformations: as the Second World War was coming to its end, the American administration had the ambition to impose a New World Order, which would first meet the interests of the US. The former imperial powers, British Empire most significantly, no longer had the financial and military capacity to hang on to their vast territories.

This article supports growing calls to 'take small states seriously' in the international political economy but questions prevailing interpretations that 'smallness' entails inherent qualities that create unique constraints on, and opportunities for, small states. Instead, we argue that discourses surrounding the 'inherent vulnerability' of small states, especially developing and less-developed states, may produce the very outcomes that are attributed to state size itself. By presenting small states as a 'problem' to be 'solved', vulnerability discourses divert attention away from the existence of unequal power structures that, far from being the 'natural' result of smallness, are in fact contingent and politically contested. The article then explores these themes empirically through discussion of small developing and less-developed states in the Commonwealth and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), considering in particular how smallness has variously been articulated in terms of what small states either cannot or will not do.

With some of the lowest levels of graduate employability across university campuses, and the non-vocational nature of most Politics/International Relations (IR) undergraduate degree programmes, the discipline faces a huge challenge in responding to the increasingly prevalent employability agenda in higher education. Indeed, as Politics/IR students feel the burden of the £9000 annual student fee now charged by most universities,5 and an ever-more contracting and competitive jobs market, a review of existing employability training and learning in the Politics/IR curriculum in universities has never been so essential. As such, this paper – based on a Higher Education Agency (HEA) funded project, Employability Learning and the Politics/IR Curriculum – explores the employability learning provision in a cross- section of English higher education institutions (HEIs) with a view to identifying examples of good practice in order to generate reflection on how best the discipline can respond to the employability agenda. The original project maps how employability is ingrained in various Politics/IR departments' curriculum. Here we present some of our preliminary findings. The bulk of this paper is formed by a discussion of the results we have gathered to date. Before proceeding to the data, however, we begin this paper by setting out the background to the employability agenda. In particular, we seek to highlight the ways in which the employability agenda has developed and been framed in higher education, as well as detailing the statistics on graduate employability in Politics/IR in order to provide some quantitative context. In so doing we aim to lay out the scale of the practical and pedagogic challenges we face as a discipline. We then go on to discuss the methodology of the project, before finally presenting and analysing our findings.

This article investigates how the means by which actors compete for position in the management of international society stratifies international order. Advancing scholarship on hierarchies, it applies a theory of social closure to examine two status groups, The Family of Civilised Nations and the G20, arguing that stratification is reproduced by a dynamic interplay of top-down collectivist exclusion on the part of superiorly positioned actors and bottom-up mimicry performed by those inferiorly positioned. As such, the same means of closure which used the Standard of Civilisation to exclude outsiders from the Family of Civilised Nations in the past stratifies non-state actors today, particularly international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) seeking to play a role in-the G20. This article offers amendments to closure theory in International Relations (IR), demonstrating its utility for analysing contemporary international politics, engaging in trans-historical analysis, and in incorporating non-state actors into enquiry.

International organizations (IOs) have long been a central focus of scholarship in international relations, yet we know remarkably little about their performance. This article offers an explanation for differences in the performance of IOs and tests it using the first quantitative data set on the topic. I argue that the primary obstacle to effective institutional performance is not deviant behavior by IO officials—as conventional "rogue-agency" analyses suggest—but the propensity of states to use IOs to promote narrow national interests rather than broader organizational objectives. IOs that enjoy policy autonomy vis-à-vis states will thus exhibit higher levels of performance. However, in the international context policy autonomy cannot be guaranteed by institutional design. Instead, it is a function of (1) the existence of (certain types of) institutionalized alliances between IOs and actors above and below the state; and (2) the technical complexity of IO activities. I provide empirical evidence for the argument by constructing and analyzing a cross-sectional data set on IO performance—based in part on a new wave of official government evaluations of IOs and in part on an original survey of IO staff—and conducting a comparative case study in the realm of global food security.

The European Union has extensive competences to engage with the world beyond its borders. Therefore, the UK's own relationships with non-EU countries are deeply embedded in the EU institutional framework, and the process of Brexit will require substantial legal reform in the UK. The term 'external relations' in fact covers an extremely wide set of policies which rely on a diverse set of legal competences. For this reason, we tend not to use the term 'foreign policy' unless this refers to the 'political' as opposed to 'economic' aspects, though even these are not always easily separated. 'External relations' is taken to cover the Common Commercial Policy, the powers of the EU to make agreements with 'third' – i.e. non-EU – countries, neighbourhood policy, development policy, relations with international institutions and what is known as the 'external dimension of internal policies'. The latter refers to a long-standing legal principle set out by the Court of Justice in Case 22-70 AETR, under which the EU has implied external competence where it enjoys internal competence. In addition to the wide variety of external competences which are scattered throughout the treaties, the legal instruments and institutional arrangements which apply across these areas are not the same throughout. This makes external relations a particularly complex area which the UK will need to extract itself from. We will address two of the main focal points of EU external relations: the CCP and the CFS.

The article introduces the special issue by exploring the full potential of "resilience" as a governing regime of the European Union and other international institutions. Developing a more comprehensive understanding of the concept is important for three reasons. One, it gives an opportunity to see resilience not only as a quality of a system, but also as a way of thinking, and a process inherent to "the local" that cannot be externally engineered. Two, as an analytic of governance, resilience challenges the current fundamentals of top-down global governance and refocuses it on the role of "the local" and "the person" to make it more responsive to people's needs. Three, resilience cannot be understood without exploring where and how it is constituted–that is, without unpacking "the local" ordering domain to see how ontological insecurity and a sense of "good life" could contribute to the emergence of more adaptive governing systems.

Is there an academic–policy divide, and does that gap need to be bridged? For decades, International Relations (IR) scholars have reflected on their roles and responsibilities towards the 'real world', while policy-makers have often critiqued the detachment of academic research. In response, there have been increased calls for academics to descend from their 'ivory tower'. However, the articles in this 100th anniversary special issue of International Affairs interrogate this so-called theory–policy divide and problematize the exchange of knowledge between academics and practitioners, highlighting the colonial underpinnings of their historical entanglements. In this introductory article we bring together the core arguments of the special issue contributions to delineate three prominent dynamics in the academic–practitioner nexus: the role of academia as a supplier of knowledge for colonial policies; the influence of imperial practice and policy-makers in shaping IR and academic knowledge production; and the contestation from academics and/or practitioners against racial hierarchies in knowledge production and policy-making. Confronting the exclusions, amnesias and denials of colonialism in the theory and practice of International Relations is the necessary first step in any process of repair towards a more just and viable politics. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed