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Truth is as regularly invoked in International Relations (IR) as it is contested. Due to increased plurality, truth is no longer taken for granted, with some suggesting that relativism is on its way. At the same time, despite uncertainty as to the meaning of truth, research and factual verification persists, as findings remain hotly debated in IR, sometimes leading to entrenched, almost irreconcilable debates among scholars. This essay suggests that one way in which to bridge truth claims in the face of potential, albeit unwarranted, relativism is to distinguish between meaningful and factual truth. Factual truth is about assessing whether (raw) data qualifies as data at all, while meaningful truth – upon which most debates in IR are based – grounds our interpretation; it reveals reality's various facets according to specific spatial and temporal concepts. Viewing conversations in IR as concerned with meaningful as opposed to factual truth allows scholars to lay relativism to rest. The essay also claims that conversations that confuse meaningfulness for factual verification – as in the debates between liberal institutionalists and structural realists in the 1990s – lead to scholarly entrenchment with no resolution in sight. Distinct temporal and spatial assumptions are often incompatible. As a result, such meaningful conversations are less about factual verifiability than about containing reification and enlarging the perspectives with which to exercise political judgement.

War has increasingly concealed itself by way of euphemism and undeclared armed conflict, a practice that has unsettled the distinction between wartime and peacetime. Each of the four books reviewed herein touches upon this topic, either directly or indirectly. Carson addresses the features of and reasons for covert operations over the course of the twentieth century, focusing on concerted concerns over the risk of escalation. Hoffman and Weiss investigate the evolution of the mainstay commitment to humanitarianism in the international arena, and the extent to which it has become increasingly attached to security. Fazal largely agrees with this conclusion, but takes it one step further. She persuasively shows how the proliferation of international humanitarian law led to a decrease in formal declarations of war among states, a practice that contributed to semantic confusion as well as to the growing use of euphemism to account for armed conflict. Schadlow argues consistently for greater conceptual and practical links between war and postconflict governance, pointing, among other things, to how ill-conceived strategy regarding the broader meaning of war leads to unsuccessful military operations. The review essay subsequently links this common thread—particularly the concealed types of warfare, the use of euphemism, and limited conceptions of armed conflict—to ongoing debates on wartime and peacetime and their relationship to the international order. Overall, the international order's specific setup in conjunction with how war is no longer explicitly recognized or declared has resulted in a division of labor among the military, technocrats, and the police. This division of labor has in turn unsettled the traditional distinction between peacetime and wartime to the effect that the latter is no longer explicitly acknowledged.

States, governments and leaders often reject one another's role prescriptions. They stick to enacting their role, what they consider to be their central purpose and main promise within a given international society. By applying the main tenets of role theory, this essay looks at the reasons why actors sometimes reject the prescriptions of others, including attempts at bargaining. Rather than claiming that those prescriptions are rejected on account of the pursuit of self-identity or ontological security, this essay suggests that those positions have more to do with defending the public credibility of one's master role, the core promise made by an actor to (domestic and/or international) audiences. Master roles have to do with the main promises of an actor in a given social and political order, thereby providing credibility to a domestic and international audience. Without maintaining credibility, the actor is unlikely to be able to fulfil master and auxiliary roles as initially set out. The essay contributes to role theory in three ways: by looking beyond explanations centred on identification and ontological security, by conversely building upon public credibility, and also by showing how audiences and roles matter to illiberal regimes. To illustrate the argument, the essay addresses the government of Uzbekistan's attempt to keep credibility in the face of Russian altercasting in the 1990s.

AbstractBy showing how a number of temporal assumptions shape three mutually exclusive narratives, the article argues for a mediated and reflexive understanding of events, one that is more open and less likely to fall into the pitfalls of a confrontation between different versions of retrospective responsibility. The article begins by looking beyond the agency and structure debate and into the temporal dimension of narrative, mainly for the sake of understanding the relationship between continuity and change. The article covers three potential narratives, focusing on their influence on the study of events, policy, and retrospective responsibility. It then illustrates their impact on mainstream understandings of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Upon describing the problems of positing strict continuity and change, both of which impact accounts of retrospective responsibility, the outline of a more reflexive, mediated approach to events and temporality is introduced, based on Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. In doing so, the article demonstrates the disadvantages ofErlebnis, an approach that unreflexively applies a limited set of temporal assumptions, highlighting instead the advantages ofErfahrung, an approach that strives for a mediated understanding of events.

This thesis applies role theory to understand how Uzbekistan's bilateral relationships became either conflicting or cooperative between 1991 and 2010. Roles are key elements of social interaction as they describe plausible lines of action in a particular subject-person. They are thus a helpful way of identifying actors and constructing narratives. Furthermore, if they are seen as metaphors for drama, one may argue that roles - as opposed to personal identities - encapsulate autonomous action, which, like a text, ascertains meaning beyond the author's intent. In other words, by separating action from intent, one may regard politics in a different light - as interaction emplotted by roles -, thereby revealing how actions contradict a set of roles and lead to conflict and crises in public credibility. This manner of emplotting relationships divulges an alternative story that, rather than focusing on Tashkent's strategic balancing and alignment, demonstrates how Uzbekistani leadership gradually developed an overarching self-reliant role set that shapes its actions. Moreover, Uzbekistan's cooperative and conflicting relationships are described less in light of strategic survival rationale than as the outcome of gradual role compatibilities arising through time. Therefore, unlike some other accounts, this thesis argues that, throughout Uzbekistan's first twenty years of independence, public disputes were crucial to understanding interaction and also that Tashkent was never actually aligned with Russia or the United States. To bring forth this argument, the following chapters expound the assumptions behind some scholarly research and develop the concepts of self-reliance, roles, action, public sphere, credibility and narrative. The discussion progresses toward self-reliance and how the concept captures President Karimov's roles, which are used to emplot Uzbekistan's interaction with the United States, Russia, Germany and Turkey. The first two are relevant for analyzing whether roles reveal more than the typical accounts based on security balancing. Germany is then included because its relationship with Tashkent was rarely conflicting in the public sphere, allowing it to increase bilateral trade and secure a military base in Uzbekistan after the 2005 Andijan Crisis. It was thus a relatively stable connection, unlike Tashkent's relationships with Washington and Moscow. Lastly, to control Germany's middle-power status, the case of Turkey is brought to the fore since Ankara's willingness to engage with Tashkent was not enough to foster cooperation.