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International relations affects everyone's lives: their security, economic well-being, rights and freedoms, and the environment they share. This book explores international relations' central concerns with the changing way that political authority is organized globally, and provides the theoretical tools to understand the dynamics of the field.

The rise of non-Western Great Powers, the spread of transnational religiously-justified insurgencies, and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism raise fundamental questions about the effects of cultural diversity on international order. Yet current debate - among academics, popular commentators, and policy-makers alike - rests on flawed understandings of culture and inaccurate assumptions about how historically cultural diversity has shaped the evolution of international orders. In this path-breaking book, Christian Reus-Smit details how the major theories of international relations have consistently misunderstood the nature and effects of culture, returning time and again to a conception long abandoned in specialist fields: the idea of cultures as coherent, bounded, and constitutive. Drawing on theoretical insights from anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, and informed by new histories of diverse historical orders, this book presents a new theoretical account of the relationship between cultural diversity and international order: an account with far-reaching implications for how we understand contemporary transformations.

This Oxford handbook assembles the world's leading scholars in international relations to present diverse perspectives about purposes, questions, theories, and methods. It will become the first point of reference for scholars and students interested in these key issues.

This book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral diplomacy? Why did the city-states of Renaissance Italy develop a system of oratorical diplomacy, while the states of absolutist Europe relied on naturalist international law and ""old diplomacy""? Conventional explanations of basic institutional pr

The liberal international order is a fragmented institutional complex, comprising often disparate elements. One of these is a distinctive institutional approach to the global organization of cultural difference. This approach combines universal Westphalian sovereignty (and the pluralist interstate order it facilitates) with international human rights norms that seek to protect the cultural freedoms of individuals. I term this institutional amalgam "global pluralism". Like many elements of the liberal order, such pluralism is now under challenge, confronted by resurgent ethno-nationalism, politicized religion, and civilizational chauvinism. The key question is whether global pluralism has the adaptive capacities to withstand such challenges. This article develops a theoretical framework for comprehending these institutional capacities. Conceiving global pluralism as a "diversity regime," I argue that such regimes always rest on social "recognition contracts," and that these give them certain structural characteristics: configurations of political authority and modes of cultural recognition. Focusing on these characteristics, I compare global pluralism with past Western and non-Western diversity regimes, and clarify the adaptive strengths and weaknesses of different institutional forms. This contractual-structural analysis exposes the historical uniqueness of global pluralism but also its structural vulnerabilities. While global pluralism has distinct advantages over past diversity regimes—principally, that it does not itself generate unstable cultural cleavages and hierarchies—it requires complex forms of social contracting to sustain, and its individualist mode of recognition struggles to accommodate collectivist cultural claims. Such contracting is essential, however, if global pluralism is to withstand current challenges, all of which involve collectivist claims.

AbstractThe modern international order faces profound challenges. Power is shifting to non-Western states and diffusing to non-state actors, including transnational insurgents. This is more than a power transition: it also about culture. Western states now share the stage with powers such as China who bring their own cultural values, practices, and histories, and new forms of transnational violence are justified in the name of religious identity and belief. Some see this as a fundamental threat to modern international order, an order created by and for the West. Others see the "liberal" order as uniquely able to accommodate states and peoples of diverse cultures. How well equipped is IR to contribute to these debates? I review four recent works on the future of the modern international order, asking what conceptual, theoretical, and empirical resources they offer for understanding the relationship between cultural diversity and international order. This literature suffers from four limitations: culture is essentialized or bracketed; institutions are seen as either simple expressions of cultural values or structures that neutralize culture, with their recognition function ignored; the structural power of international orders—how they produce political and cultural subjectivities—is underappreciated; and international orders are conceived too narrowly as orders of sovereign states. To overcome these limitations, I advance a new perspective on cultural diversity and international order. International orders evolve in heterogeneous cultural contexts, and the governance of diversity is a key imperative of order building. In response, international orders developdiversity regimes: institutional norms and practices that define legitimate units of political authority, authorize certain forms of cultural difference, and relate the two. These regimes are essential to the legitimacy of international orders, but face two interrelated pressures for change: shifts in underlying material capabilities, and new claims for cultural recognition, often rooted in grievances against past or prevailing forms of recognition.