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How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states' obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis.Mit

How states cooperate in the absence of a sovereign power is a perennial question in international relations. With Power in Concert, Jennifer Mitzen argues that global governance is more than just the cooperation of states under anarchy: it is the formation and maintenance of collective intentions, or joint commitments among states to address problems together. The key mechanism through which these intentions are sustained is face-to-face diplomacy, which keeps states'obligations to one another salient and helps them solve problems on a day-to-day basis. Mitzen argues that the origins of this practice lie in the Concert of Europe, an informal agreement among five European states in the wake of the Napoleonic wars to reduce the possibility of recurrence, which first institutionalized the practice of jointly managing the balance of power. Through the Concert's many successes, she shows that the words and actions of state leaders in public forums contributed to collective self-restraint and a commitment to problem solving--and at a time when communication was considerably more difficult than it is today. Despite the Concert's eventual breakdown, the practice it introduced--of face to face diplomacy as a mode of joint problem solving--survived and is the basis of global governance today

AbstractAn earlier version of this Research Note was presented as the Keynote Address at the ISA Northeast Conference November 2022. The conference theme was "Imagining World Futures: Exploring Alternative Visions of International Studies and World Politics in the Next 20–200 Years."

While the EU has long been understood as a postnational political project, stressors like migration have prompted "neo‐Westphalian" responses. For insight into such backsliding, I focus on the concept of home. A psychological need for home as a place of "being" is central to an ontological security approach to subjectivity, and home qualities that resonate psychologically underpin political projects such as the Westphalian homeland. At both levels, home is understood as an enclosed refuge. But home is not necessarily that way, and that monological discourse, which privileges borders, limits our political imagination. To reclaim a plural notion of home, drawing on Winnicott and others, I propose that home is a space of "being with becoming." Scaling up, this makes room for a new macro political idea, homespace. EU migration governance reproduces ideas of the home as homeland. I propose reorienting the imaginary of home to homespace, which focuses on centering and emplacement practices and locales of encounter, to help capture the promise in the EU's post‐Westphalian territoriality.

Scholarship on security communities often invokes a common goal: for war to become unthinkable. Unthinkable here means impossible, and states are considered to be most secure when war is unthinkable between them. Interestingly, the term unthinkable appears in policy discourse with nearly the opposite meaning, referring to wars that are eminently possible but horrifying to contemplate, such as war with a nuclear Iran. Taking this discrepancy as my starting point, I propose that the social phenomenon of unthinkability is not well understood and that a deeper understanding of it can point toward new directions for research on security communities. I conceptualize unthinkability along two dimensions, empirical availability and normative acceptability, combining these to create four distinct types of unthinkability. I then use this typology as a heuristic device to identify research directions on security communities and on the phenomenon of unthinkable war.

This is quite a book. Its sheer heft is daunting, its central claim bold and sweeping, its data relentless. While the planet goes "cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity," Steven Pinker argues, the human species has been progressing. We have reduced the fear of violent death for an ever-greater proportion of the population across the centuries. Pinker argues that every sort of violence has declined, from interpersonal cruelty to interstate war, beginning toward the end of the medieval period and extending to today. He then identifies the causes of decline so that we can know what can extend the trend into the future. This will allow us, as he puts it, to "obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right" (p. xxvi).